This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licensevary in detail, but can be organized into two broad categories: (1) emergent curriculum and (2) multicultural and
anti-bias curriculum.
Emergent curriculum
An emergent curriculum is one that explicitly builds on interests expressed by students, rather than goals set
by curriculum writers, curriculum documents, or teachers. As you might suspect, therefore, instructional planning
for an emergent curriculum does not have the same meaning that the term has had in the chapter up to now.
Instead, since an emergent curriculum by definition unfolds spontaneously and flexibly, students’ interests may be
predictable, but usually not very far in advance (Peterson, 2002). Suppose, for example, that a first-grade teacher
plans a unit around Halloween, and that as one of the activities for this unit she reads a book about Halloween. In
listening to the book, however, the students turn out to be less interested in its Halloween content than in the fact
that one of the illustrations in the book shows a picture of a full moon partially hidden by clouds. They begin asking
about the moon: why it is full sometimes but not other times, why it rises in different places each month, and
whether the moon really moves behind clouds or whether the clouds actually do the moving. The teacher
encourages their questions and their interest in moon astronomy. Over the next days or weeks, she arranges further
activities and experiences to encourage students’ interest: she sets aside her original plans about Halloween and
finds books about the moon and about how the solar system works. She invites a local amateur astronomer to visit
the group and talk about his observations of the moon. Several children build models of the moon out of paper
maché. Some find books describing trips of the space shuttles to the moon. Others make a large mural depicting a
moonscape. And so on; the original goals about Halloween are not so much rejected, as set aside or forgotten in
favor of something more immediately interesting and motivating.
While these activities could in principle happen because of recommendations from a curriculum document, the
key point about emergent curriculum is that they happen for a very different reason: these activities happen and the
goals emerge because the children want them. A teacher’s challenge is therefore not planning activities that match
predetermined curriculum goals or objectives, but to respond flexibly and sensitively as students’ interests become
known and explicit. Teachers’ responsiveness is facilitated by two practices that are especially prominent when a
teacher adopts an emergent approach to curriculum. The first is careful, continuous observation of students. The
teacher watches and listens, and may keep informal written records of students’ comments and activities. The
information allows her to respond more effectively to the interests they express, and at the same time it provides a
type of assessment of students’ progress—information about what the students are actually learning.
A second strategy that facilitates teachers’ success is curriculum webbing, a process of brainstorming
connections among initiatives suggested by students and ideas suggested by the teacher. In some cases webs can be
created jointly with students by brainstorming with them about where their current interests may lead. In other
cases they can be created independently by the teacher’s own reflections. In still others, when a classroom has more
than one adult responsible for it, they can be created jointly with fellow teachers or teacher assistants. The latter
approach works especially well in preschool, kindergartens, or special education classrooms, which often have more
than one adult responsible for the class (Vartuli & Rohs, 2006).
To some, emergent curriculum may seem like a formula for curriculum and management disasters. But the
approach has often proved quite successful, particularly in early childhood education and the earliest grade levels of
Educational Psychology 224 A Global Text