classroomofchildren.PDF

The inquiry for curriculum awareness and life in classroom of children Chen Mei-Ju National Shinchu University of Education Abstract How have the several-year curriculum reform added to children’s understanding of courses? How do they spend school days? What is their classroom experience? Classrooms are the main venue for their school lives, but children’s physical and mental status in classrooms remains a mystery that earns flagging attention from adults. Through interviewing 96 subjects from 4 elementary schools, this study aims to provide a glimpse of children’s learning and their classroom experience. It shows that subjects, as well as teaching style, are stereotyped. Furthermore, being controlled and helpless in classes, they cannot do anything but accept it. The findings also drive us to the significant difference among the real practices inside classrooms, the student-centered approaches and active learning that has been promoted by policies for years. Keywords: children, life in classroom, experiencing curriculum, curriculum understanding 1 The inquiry for curriculum awareness and life in classroom of children Introduction The behavior of wisdom is to understand children (Manen, 2005,p200). Curriculum reform has been promoting since twenty years ago. However, if we did not truly understand what our children are thinking, we could not have a better understanding of how curriculum happens in the classroom. Classrooms are the main venue for children’s school lives, but children’s physical and mental status in classrooms remains a mystery that earns flagging attention from adults. Most adults only care about grades and ranking, and different stakeholders merely pay attention to allocation of resources that related to their o