"Because it's there"

Mallory on Everest, did he make it?

Two Sundays ago I had the pleasure of watching the inspiring documentary The Wildest Dream: Conquest of Everest on ABC2’s Sunday Best. The documentary examined the life of famous climber George Mallory and claims that he was in fact the first person to successfully climb Mt Everest. While the evidence might contradict history’s claim that this was done by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, George Mallory’s determination to conquer the impossible provides an important parallel to the work of teachers in classrooms: curricula and assessment.

To explain, George Mallory was once asked "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?"

His response, "Because it's there".

While this has become arguably the most famous quote in mountaineering, importantly, it showed his determination to conquer the impossible. However, it might also be a response many teachers have to the question by students: “Why are we studying this topic?” or “Why do we have to do this task?” That is, we are often forced into covering material or grading students on tasks simply because they are written into curriculum documents or told to us by various heads of department. This can often be at the expense of material that genuinely engages the students and thus destroys a love of learning. Moreover, this view can be expressed in meetings or informal talks between subject teachers yet nothing gets changed at a departmental level because they lack the agency to make it happen.

I find myself struggling with this too when I teach history. The national curriculum has very clear guidelines in terms of content and topics to be covered. Unfortunately, this does not reflect the actual amount of time teachers have to teach the course or whether students want to relearn the same material in a slightly different way for the 10^th time. For instance, I recently taught the section on Movement of People and found that the topic that got the most complaints was Australian experiences of settlement. While I see the importance of looking at convicts, settlers and First Australians, this material is done to death in lower grades and thus students feel like they are being punished. Moreover, the lack of time I had to teach the material meant it was covered in a brief manner that did not do the topic justice.

However, in some senses I was happy to take this criticism. I spent most of the unit looking at the slave trade and William Wilberforce, topics that really engaged the students. We were able to explore the issue of modern slavery, Kony 2012 and the role of politics in creating change. From a curriculum stand point this was barely a quarter of the unit but based on the student’s reaction to and engagement with the topic, I judged it prudent to lose time on these other topics. Furthermore, I had a supportive head of department that was willing to allow me to do this as long as I covered certain topics in enough detail.

So coming back to Mallory: how often do we teach something “because it’s there”? Is this good enough? Should we all just throw out the curriculum and all go our own way? Is following the curriculum exactly the wildest dream after all?

In reality, curriculum is written to provide an outline for teachers with assessment as a way to mark student progress for report cards. Each school is different with some being stricter than others. For instance, at a middle school in Canberra they literally map out a lesson by lesson plan which they expect to be followed. In other cases, curriculum is just a guide with heads of department willing to negotiate certain aspects while ensuring assessment standards are maintained. Thus most teachers follow the curriculum for the most part, try to finish it if they can and if not they don’t get too stressed.

However, if Mallory could have the wildest dream of conquering Mt Everest, why can’t teachers have the wildest dream of freedom of curriculum? Clearly various forms of national or state curricula and testing lead to targeted lessons to help students do best in the final exam (and this is of course a natural outcome of this model) but is there an alternative?

If our focus of schooling is to ensure students can pass a written exam on a given day on a given amount of content then we are on the right track but this does not reflect the real world. No worthwhile job in the real world nowadays relies on a set amount of content with a written exam at the end. Most jobs require students to be flexible and creative thinkers: problem solvers who can adapt to a range of situations. The school model with its mandated curricula and assessment in no way reflects this reality.

Wouldn't it be better to give students a topic area and ask them to come up with a task to hand in? Of course guidelines would be required and students may not love every topic area but at least they could explore the topic area in a way that engaged them. Rather than saying we will study and do a test on First Australians, settler men, settler women and convicts, imagine if I had said to my class: choose an area on the settlement of Australia from 1788 to 1901 and decide on an assessment task to give me. I can now imagine a class full of students bursting with ideas about what to research and how to present it. Imagine: all the students with relatives who were convicts, students who had visited Indigenous communities and learnt some of their customs, students interested in the politics of early Sydney and the various other possibilities. Now imagine all the various ways they might like to show their knowledge: iPad apps, websites, computer games, museum displays, videos etc.

In summary, like Mallory, this post may meet its end in the death zone: starved of oxygen, not at the pinnacle and forgotten about until dug up 75 years later (see picture). However, just as Mallory had the wildest dream of conquering the impossible, there is nothing wrong with the wildest dream of education: genuinely engaging classes with all students buying into the process. This may not be achieved under current curricula and assessment practices but we need to start making attempts at the summit. Who knows, we one day might make it.