In one of my favourite books Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) contrasts the noun-centric English with more verb-centred Indigenous languages, such as her native Potawatomi. Through this comparison she introduces us to the notion of a ‘Grammar of Animacy’. She explains how in Potawatomi, living things, and parts of nature- rivers, rocks and trees- that in English would be designated as ‘it’ are given agency, regarded as ‘alive’ or ‘animated’ linguistically. She explores how this aliveness occurs in the relationship between things, giving the example of a ‘bay’. In English, a bay is a noun- an object or static thing- but in Potawatomi, there is no word for ‘a bay’ as a thing. Instead, there is a verb‘wiikwegamaa’,which means ‘to be a bay’. This verb captures what the bay does, how it acts,holds, embraces, or participatesin shaping the shoreline. She says:
“A bay is a noun only if water is a noun. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa-‘to be a bay’- releases the water from bondage and lets it live” (Wall Kimmerer 2013: 55).
I am fascinated by this notion of animacy and what this shift in thinking might do for our ways of being in the world. I’m curious about how we might apply this to our thinking about curriculum and the possibilities of how this might shift how young people see and experience their world, their place in it and relatedness to it. The ways that it might, to paraphrase Wall Kimmerer release them from bondage and let them live.
I realise this is a bold statement, but the greatest leaders I know have never shied away from being bold. Micheal Young’s (2008) concept of ‘Powerful Knowledge’ is to me the essence of this. In his 2008 book Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education, he argued that education should not just be about skills or experiences, but about giving students access to the kind of knowledge traditionally held by specialists- the kind of knowledge that gives people the power to think critically, explain the world, and participate in society.
Daniel Willingham’s central thesis in Why Students Don’t Like School (2009) is that they don’t dislike school because they hate learning, they dislike it when learning feels too hard or meaningless.The human brain is wired to avoid unnecessary effort, especially when tasks seem confusing, boring, or pointless. If a curriculum lacks coherence or effort is focused in the wrong places, for example a pupils’ working memory is preoccupied with task completion rather than deep learning, then of course it will not be satisfying.
This is why we need impassioned, embodied teachers in physical classrooms[1], who are supported to be deeply rooted in their subjects. I wrote recently about the dangers of teachers being a few pages ahead in the textbook. The problem here isn’t just the shallowness of the teacher’s knowledge, it’s the lack of coherence, sequencing and the glass ceiling that inevitably follows. Atomised learning is inherently unsatisfying. I find it interesting (and grossly undeserved), that the critique levelled at the knowledge-rich approach is that it is about getting kids to remember a fragmented bunch of facts. Yet, the utter overwhelm of having all of AI at your fingertips, without a sure footing in disciplinary thinking is so often glossed over[2].
I’m deeply drawn to Christine Counsell’s notion of curriculum as narrative as an antidote to this. In a truly powerful curriculum, learning has meaning as part of a wider whole. This is the young person’s schema, which, supported by pedagogy rooted in the science of learning, is built up, and remembered, over time.
This notion, that something has meaning because of its relationship to a wider whole, chimes with Wall Kimmerer’s notion of animacy. A Curriculum of Animacy therefore, is not really about knowledge or skills but aliveness. It is about the connections, fissures and spaces between what is learnt. It is about how we, the fallible humans that we are, try to map, navigate and make sense of the world we live in. It’s about embodying this as teachers, so that our young people might care about it and have a stake it it. It is about how we make it coherent and meaningful, not in a neat or totalising way, but in a way that makes space for engagement with the multitudes and aliveness of what is actually there. How we help our children to notice the aliveness of the world, animating and inspiring the next generation. So that our children might feel alive in it.
We talk a lot about inspiration in education. The word, has both physical and spiritual roots. Drawn from the Latin, it literally means ‘a breathing into’. This is what great teachers do, they breathe life into an otherwise strange and confusing set of concepts and experiences, which, when done well, allow their students to experience and make sense of the world more fully.
One of the best things to have come out of the renewed focus on curriculum in recent years is the investment in high quality centralised resources, that leave curriculum overviews and sequences to subject experts, freeing up time for teachers to teach and ensuring coherence and equity of pupil experience. However, a lethal mutation of this is, that many teachers, without a true understanding of the whole, are also missing this aliveness. I learnt this the hard way as an overstretched subject leader, expecting my team to pick up my resources and run with them. As School Improvement Lead, I have seen plenty of ‘dead lessons’[3] in schools that have bought into (often very high quality) curriculum packages. Passion, subject knowledge and teacher buy in (if not total autonomy) are absolutely critical. In a specialist skills shortage, the subject leader role (be that across a school or a Trust) is pivotal in fostering this.
This focus on the mode of delivery chimes with something I wrote recently about what I think creativity is. Like inspiration, the word has physical and spiritual roots, it means ‘to make, produce or bring forth’. I argued that creativity comes in part from being able to master a craft but also through maintaining a playful irreverence, an openness to possibilities that fosters new ideas and synergies. We need to retain a certain amount of openness to the other, and the humility to know that the curriculum is never a finished article. When it is enacted in lessons and engaged with by students, this is simply another iteration. It is this bit that, for me, transcends the function of curriculum as transmitting ‘the best that has been thought and said’. Though sharing human knowledge is important, I think it’s naïve and anthropocentric to suggest the story stops there. A true curriculum has space for the more than human, for our subjects and the parts of our world they relate, to have their own voices too. It is this bit that is alive.
Once you start looking for it, this aliveness is everywhere in our schools. You could say it comes from the force of personality of some teachers themselves but that definitely misses something too. The subject brings its own energy. This is connected the teacher and student but has also a force of its own. As Parker J Palmer puts it in The Courage to Teach (1997) “The subject is not just a body of knowledge but a living entity that we explore together”.
It really is, I’ve seen Biologists breathe this life into their lessons on respiration (pun intended) stirring up a sense of wonder as students lean in, eyes widening, captivated by the choreography of molecules that sustain life. I watched Mathematicians become enlivened as they bring into sharp focus the exquisite beauty of geometry and students sit up straighter and think more sharply as a result. I’ve witnessed English teachers share the study of Ozymandias or Dystopian Literature in such a way that it sings with right-now relevance. Enabling students to draw lines between ancient ruins and modern empires, between fictional futures and today’s headlines.
Life is already embedded everywhere in our curriculum. But what would it be if we invited it in further, making it explicit that we were looking for by fostering and celebrating animacy?
Visual arts, for instance offers us many such opportunities. I have a fascination with impressionism and post-impressionist art. This movement, whose origins are in 19th century France, sought to capture something of the aliveness of its subject, through painting. The fleeting impression, of a moment. These artists were especially interested in how light, colour, and atmosphere change over time and how this translates (or relates) to the medium of oils. What this form of art offers us is not a representation but a relationship- a way of letting the world speak again through colour and form, not as object but as participant in a shared aliveness that neither begins nor ends in the painting.
An expression of water, in impressionist style
Perhaps everything we teach or about the world is a bit like this. We will never be able to pin down or capture the truth or totality of this beautiful world we live in, nor would we want to. However, in engaging with the curriculum as a verb, celebrating its interconnectedness, and the impossibility of capturing the subject in our disciplines, we can, like an Artist, point at it just long enough for our students to feel inspired.
Fostering this connectedness and the wonder feels to me like our best shot at engendering joyful and engaged global citizens who can find meaning and purpose in this challenging and changing world.
Bibliography:
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. Jossey-Bass.
Willingham, D. T. (2009). Why Don’t Students Like School? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for your classroom. Jossey‑Bass.
Young, M. (2008). Bringing Knowledge Back In: From Social Constructivism to Social Realism in the Sociology of Education. London: Routledge.
[1] Having recently undertaken a large amount of my own professional learning almost entirely remotely I am convinced more than ever of how precious the human element is. Despite, loving learning and an surfeit of excellent, well sequenced content (with plenty of opportunities for retrieval) I would have been totally disengaged if it was not for my wonderful coach and community.
[2] Perhaps it is another blog but I’m worried that tokenistic lessons on prompts or source verification might become the norm. I know from my own cautious use of ChatGPT, how frequently it presents misconceptions as truth. Such that I only use it in domains that I am already incredibly confident in, to ensure what I am generating is evidence based and accurate.
[3] I mean dead in the way the kids use it not literally dead.
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