Common Language or Common Values?

One of the themes I am observing as we work to rethink a curriculum is the wrestle over control.  

There is the wrestle over intellectual turf.  Divisions.  

There is the wrestle over old battles, historical skirmishes long completed but never forgotten or absolved.  

There is the wrestle of "catching up" with current practice and new, unfolding ideas, and the anxiety of being "caught" or "exposed."   

There is the wrestle over the best curriculum, the best "content," the best skills, the best structures and assignments to provide and expose student to, and in what order.

There is the anger that erupts because a good idea may die on the vine because, in the ideation process, good and better ideas keep coming.  When we rethink and reinvent curriculum, and learning experiences, we have to be willing to take risks, liberate ourselves from fixed ideas.  After all, that is what ideation and design is all about--working the process to find the best solution, not the most comfortable or most familiar or most politically expedient solution.

How do we define best?

How do we craft the best learning experience for art and design students?

Can we afford to settle?

The question that puzzles me lately is that we tend to forget the process that led us to the structure we have now.  In other words, we accept the status quo as informed, smart, stable, when in truth very few of us are aware of the process that led to its formation, and we have not, id we are honest, assessed it.

I will say it again: we have not assessed the current educational structure.  We simply assume that it is working.  That it is good.   

And we also assume that any suggested changes to the current structure are either exceptional improvements, or unmitigated disasters. 

Any suggested changes are perceived as threats.  Until we cross he threshold of buy-in and acceptance, and then realize that it's simply a matter of implementing, making it work.  Shifting from threat to action. 

Teaching and learning, developing curriculum, inventing curriculum, reinventing a learning experience--these are the lifeblood of an educator's life!  They are interconnected, interdependent.  

How can awaken to this?  How can we activate this?