They Can't … They Won't … They Did: Overcoming Reductive Perceptions of Teachers with Colorado's Sample Curriculum Project

Abstract

In this essay Brian R. Sevier, Joanna Bruno, Karol Gates, Stephanie Hartman, Mary Ellen Pittman, Vince Puzick, Phyllis Reed, and Beverly Reimer describe their effort at the Colorado Department of Education to recruit and engage educators in authoring free and open-source curriculum samples for preK-12 academic content areas. The story of Colorado's Sample Curriculum Project illuminates how this team navigated constraints to foreground teachers as intellectual professionals who were ready and willing to use their knowledge and experience in deliberative and collaborative community. It also reveals the intransigency of perspectives that downplay the significance of teacher knowledge and collaboration. Highlighting both the possibilities that materialize when teachers engage, create, and collaborate and the persistent doubters of those possibilities, the authors argue for opportunities for professional expression that undermine reductive perspectives of teachers and their capabilities.