Hi, I’m Dr Josey De Rossi,

This newsletter and my website are dedicated to curriculum development and design. I’m wondering how you’ve experienced the transition from institutional to freelance work? Was that after spending the majority of your professional life, as I did, working in schools and education system administration?

How have you managed your re-invention as a business owner? In which box did you put the pedagogical question of what difference you now make to teaching and learning? How do you bring together marketing and other content creation strategies?

SEVEN questions on setting up a curriculum creation business

  • What are FLS beliefs on human learning potential?

    The following Peanuts cartoon took pride of place in the principal’s office of my first school (I was barely 21). I’ve used it over the years to focus on the fact that a child’s learning is inseparable from what a whole lot of adults believe and say about what he/she can/not do. That’s why I believe that if curriculum creators are to reinvent their importance in a digital age, they must become passionate about methods of recognition and reward. One such group that I know is doing just that is the Woodleigh Institute under the direction of Dr Richard Owen.

    Richard and his team are bringing together an impressive conference in November 2021, reimagining the pathways and possibilities for senior secondary education. Indeed, they show how curriculum makers are honour-bound to find and present evidence of every young person’s fantastic achievements. That’s what a ‘curriculum framework’ should do after all, right? It should make intended outcomes transparent.

  • What education ethos guides FLS work?

    It is clear to me that curriculum makers are in a particularly powerful position today. We have technologies that make production and distribution cheap and fast. That means resources, learning events and timely connections can fly like never before.

    However, what remains challenging are the ethical and political values that shape their use in our mission to bring together teaching and learning experiences. In turn, this impacts how we measure the effectiveness of those experiences through our documents, interactions and multimodal curriculum-based communications?

    Speaking personally, doing ‘fantastic work’ can’t be anything other than accounting for the full scope of human potential, allowing us to share a common humanity. Holding up the Preamble of the United Nations Charter alongside my work from time to time, for instance, is a sobering thing to do.

  • What educational practices excite my work in FLS & why?

    Like many curriculum developers, I’ve had my eyes opened in the last decade by many theories and practical applications of teaching and learning strategies.

    The most well-known ones that have championed the idea of ‘what works best’ include for me: Visible Learning, New Pedagogies For Deep Learning, Positive Psychology, Growth Mindset, the Australian Council for Educational Research’s Learning Progressions, Design Thinking and the UK’s Education Endowment Foundation‘s  Teaching and Learning Toolkit.

    I have also been a keen observer of how state education departments have come to focus on curriculum impact, such as Victoria has done through its HITS strategies. These bring together “10 instructional practices that reliably increase student learning when they’re applied.”

    Furthermore, I’ve followed the impact of cognitive science research on curriculum development. For instance, I completed the Coursera MOOC Learning How To Learn. Impressively, the most popular course on the learning platform, its facilitators Professors Barbara Oakley and Terrence Sejnowski deliver an excellent experience of how to avoid cognitive load.

    However, the ideas that have excited me the most have come from studies of creativity and philosophy such as from Harvard’s Project Zero; cognitive linguists and philosophers (e.g. George Lakoff, Mark Turner); embodied cognition by theatre and dance historians (e.g. Bruce McConachie, Nicola Shaughnessy) and through sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on organisational management.

  • How do I deal with cognitive overload in FLS curriculum design?

    Fantastic, in my mind, is an apt way to describe curriculum creation in a digital world. Interestingly, driven by the fact that the monetisation of knowledge no longer remains just the territory of software developers. It now also belongs to content strategists, user experience specialists, digital marketers, self-publishers and a score of new content creation professions.

    Kristina Halvorsen’s ‘honeycomb diagram’ is an early demonstration of what was happening in her content strategy business, Brain Traffic. Just look at the complexity of what creatives considered important when communicating on the web!

    Surely, no one doubts that digital disruption is redrawing ALL our professional roles!

    As a result, as I see it, curriculum content creation is no longer just the domain of school, university and vocational training professionals. Instead, it’s potentially something you need to employ for running any online business. This is the journey I have gone on myself as formal areas of curriculum development moved away from ‘curriculum branches’ in education departments.

    It is in that context that I call the KAJABI platform fantastic! On it, course creation and digital marketing sit side-by-side within a comprehensive toolkit of web pages, customer relationship management tools and ‘pipeline’ automation.

  • How do 21st Century Skills impact FLS work?

    In 2020/2021, I participated in Learning Creates Australia‘s National Social Lab looking at “solutions around new metrics and a better recognition system for a range of pathways beyond school”.

    I believe that the project vitally highlights key problems in our current system. It brings together a significant group of people, nationally and globally, who are collectively saying that the curriculum needs to change.

    It was inspirational for me to view how LCA produced its first major findings through the report, Recognition of learning success for all. Under Professor Sandra Milligan and her team at the University of Melbourne, the report brings together the work of schools, communities and Social Lab teams to summarised the existing case for change. In short, that

    Key indicators and metrics are not improving, or are improving only slowly. Many young people are still not completing school. Standards of attainment in some core areas of learning are falling. Even for those who complete school, transition into a satisfying post-school pathways is often difficult and slow and not conducive to confidence.

  • What does FLS mean by ‘fantastic work’ curriculum-wise?

    Creating a sense of the fantastic in curriculum designs is a vital part of my work. Here’s just a small example of what I mean.

    When I first viewed the Wearable Art creations some twenty years ago, they became for me some of the best resources for teaching thinking skills to my students. The practice of wearing ‘art’ pushed me to think through drawing up conceptual categories with them.

    We tussled about the known and the unknown. How metaphors are realised. How human experiences move us from being artistic, scientific, indeed, into many fields of knowledge. In short, our discussions were fantastic!

By contrast, antonyms to fantastic include adjectives like serious, common, conventional, plain, poor and small. You get the drift. No depiction of ‘larger-than-life’ qualities, or breaking open conventional approaches to size or standing.

So, today, I find myself asking could such a mindset be worse than outright failure? In my view, yes, because at least a sense of failure is part of building the resilience needed for success. However, to be capture by some limiting vision of human potential is death in the doldrums. (Read Agamemnon in Aeschylus’ trilogy of The Oresteia for the most brilliant descriptions of the Greek fleet, travelling to Troy, being caught in the doldrums and turning into rotting hulks)

An anecdote pops into my head from a talk to postgraduates by UWA’s Vice-Chancellor Fay Gale in 1990. I was just setting off on my doctoral adventures. In it, Professor Gale shared the story of how water-collecting receptacles found above limestone caves along the Great Australian Bight were not considered for decades by researchers as human-made creations.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128141243000923

Why? The European researchers refused to view the people living in the caves as capable of technology that could funnelled water from the surface to their dwelling places below. Rather, they were prepared to investigate how wind and water had produced them! Of course, the story plays into debates around the ‘pygmalion effect’ and other theories of ‘self-fulfilling’ prophesies. However, for Professor Gale, it best illustrated how cultural annihilation is most effectively realised by narrowing human learning, in ourselves as well as others.

What do you think of my thoughts on curriculum development and design?

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Josey De Rossi loves writing about creative learning. She has also written on theatre entrepreneurship. These days she works with writers, content creators and educators on the productivity and ecstasy of great curriculum design.