Ivory-Tower Academics Are Now Claiming Knowledge-Building Curriculum Is Bad

So apparently knowledge-building curriculum is white supremacy now.

I was really shocked to see this article on Twitter from a British academic named Ian Cushing, who claims that knowledge-building curriculum is an example of coloniality and anti-blackness and white supremacy.

And he actually criticizes my colleague Dan Willingham, who's here on TikTok and has done amazing work, the cognitive psychologist Dan Willingham, who has been a big supporter of knowledge building curriculum.

And I have to take this a little bit personally on behalf of Dan and take this as an attack on our profession itself and on the good work that is being done to actually help kids.

And I don't know what's going on in universities or wherever this particular person works, where you can apparently earn a criticizing important work that is being done to actually help students, not because it doesn't work, not because it's misguided, but because you can get paid to find something problematic in anything.

And I think there are some very real concerns about a deficit approach.

I think we've all...

in our profession heard about kind of deficit thinking and how we should not have deficit thinking toward our students.

And certainly we don't need to be disrespectful to our, our students.

We don't need to criticize their families in terms of the way they speak or what they, you know, what knowledge they come in with.

But I think, uh, Behind all of that is a commitment to actually teach students things, right?

We can be respectful to our students and recognize that all students come in with different background knowledge and may know things that we don't know, but it's still our job to actually teach them specific things.

And what we're hearing from academia now is this idea that that is actually white supremacy to want to teach our students specific things and not just validate the things that they already know.

Like, why would you be an educator if...

If you just wanted to validate and appreciate the things that your students already knew and not teach them anything new, like none of your students come in knowing everything that they're supposed to know.

We want all of our students to leave knowing things that they didn't come in knowing.

And who suffers if we don't do that, right?

If we just say, well, we're just here to validate the knowledge that our students bring with them.

We're not here to actually teach them anything.

Well, the kids who already know lots of stuff are going to be fine with that.

The kids who come in knowing a lot less and being at a real disadvantage in life.

This is not a disadvantage that we're manufacturing because we hate kids.

These are real disadvantages in life to not have the background knowledge to be able to read grade level text.

These are real things.

And knowledge building curriculum allows us to actually close gaps.

That is what is so powerful about it.

I'm a big fan of Natalie Wexler's book, The Knowledge Gap.

I'm a big fan of knowledge building curriculum.

And there are many, many good curricula on the market now that actually build students knowledge so that they can learn to read, so they can understand their schoolwork all the way through and succeed in life.

But I think we've got to just like start openly laughing at these academics who try to find a problem with everything and try to criticize the things that actually work to help our students.

So check this out and let me know what you think.