RE: Grounding Tenet for Learning

I agree.  Your response also points out the importance of threading replies.  Marybeth Song and I both responded earlier with comments to spur our thinking about what classrooms and curriculum would be like that engaged students.

In reponse to your comments and to extend my previous remarks - we are born wired to make sense of our experiences.  It is this desire to understand our world that makes us curious.  School should be a place, a laboratory, in which life is tried out.  In which we 'test' our assumptions about the world; where we engage with others in figuring out what to think and how to act.  

The curriculum (the disciplines) comes in as a tool to help us solve problems.  It is also the place where questions and issues arise - inquiry.

Let me provide a condensed example with 1st graders.  They had been reading a story about an inquisitive young girl - and they were making some assertions about how this young girls knew this or that.  The discussion then took off on how we know/how we think - which lead to discussing the role the brain plays in thinking, where our thoughts come from etc.  The students made some interesting comments and showed that they knew some physiology but they also had some misconceptions.  The motivation to figure this out was there.  The teacher then turned to the disciplines of science to help the children learn more about their bodies/their minds.

I think our classrooms, as Marybeth urged, was to become places in which problems are posed, examined, and solved.  This requires skills in literacy and math, but also it provides opportunities to underscore the relevance of the disciplines in our everyday lives.