Children's interpretations of curriculum events

The purpose of the project reported in this paper was to explore the nature of children's everyday interpretations of curriculum events in classrooms and the potential impact of these interpretations on their evolving understandings of subject matter. The particular focus of this study was on how students in a fourth-grade class interpret curriculum events, especially those involving mathematics. To establish a framework for examining the experienced curriculum, we drew on four lines of inquiry: (a) subject matter learning; (b) everyday representations of mathematical concepts; (c) knowledge production processes in classrooms; and (d) children's event structured knowledge. The domains of research surveyed above underscored for us (a) the importance of interpretation in the acquisition of knowledge, (b) the role of everyday understandings in this interpretative process, (c) the significance of children's immediate experiences with curriculum in a classroom, and (d) the potential influence of broad event frames in children's interpretation of curriculum. Within these perspectives, then, the observations and analysis were focused on children's interpretations of curriculum events, with special attention to their interpretations of events involving mathematics.