Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum: On Literacy, Diversity, and the Interplay of Children’s and Teachers’ Worlds

Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum: On Literacy, Diversity, and the Interplay of Children’s and Teacher’s Worlds is part of the Garn Press Women Scholars Series. Originally printed in 1993 in the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Concept Paper Series, Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum revisits Dyson’s powerful concept of a permeable curriculum, a socially constructed learning space created by teachers and children.

Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum is a timeless piece as it is relevant to current moves in education with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). In 2010, the CCSS were released as a set of standards devised to create national benchmarks of student knowledge and skills in literacy and math. While not specifically mentioning curriculum, the CCSS explicitly outlines what should be taught from kindergarten to grade 12 and, therefore, it has had a major impact on establishing a national curriculum and assessment system led by private, corporate companies.

Challenging the standardization of learning, Dyson ask readers to push back the “curricular curtain” to wonder about the complex social and intellectual work in which children engage when they become writers. The emphasis on becoming focuses on how learning to write is always a dynamic state, as children learn about themselves while they learn about written language. In Negotiating a Permeable Curriculum, Dyson provides concrete examples of the social and cultural challenges learning to become writers entails. Dyson highlights how teachers can enact a permeable curriculum so that the worlds of teachers and children come together in instructionally powerful ways.