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In the late 1960s, Laura Dittman, professor at the University of Maryland's Institute for Child Study and NAEYCs last volunteer editor of Young Children, invited me to contribute to a collected work on curriculum planning in early childhood education. I was interested, but also confused, as I had always been by the concept of curriculum. In my experience, curriculum was what elementary teachers rather than preschool teachers were supposed to cover, using prescribed textbooks and worksheets.
My own introduction to working with children was in a 1950s university lab preschool where adults "set the stage" for children's exploration in a rich learning environment, and teachers focused their energy on observing children's play and recording anecdotal notes on notepads kept in their smock pockets (Jones & Reynolds 2011). We made plans from day to day in response to our observations and reflections on children's needs and interests. The curriculum was set down only after it had taken place, not laid out in advance except in broad terms.
These two focuses - creating the physical environment and studying the child - characterized the development of early childhood education in the first half of the twentieth century. Maria Montessori pioneered the focus on materials in the physical classroom, which were designed with great care to support children's cognitive and aesthetic development. In the 1940s child psychologists such as Arnold Gesell created child study laboratories at universities, taking detailed notes on children's physical and socialemotional development. In the 1950s psychoanalyst Erik Erikson first published a theory of developmental stages that explained in depth the role of play at the stage of initiative, the years from 3 to 5. Each of these thinkers focused attention on the young child as an active, self-motivated learner, deserving of intensive study in a thoughtfully planned environment.
And so I offered Laura the title "Curriculum Is What Happens" for the book. She liked it but insisted on adding "Planning Is the Key." That was OK with me, as long as we were clear that planning is done all along the way by program staff and not in advance by expert strangers who have never met the program's children.
In the last half of the twentieth century and today, the pressure to teach a prescribed...