They just don't want to admit that we are out there.  They think we are like the dinosaurs - extinct!

Part One:  Introduction

 The SMALL SCHOOLS CURRICULUM PROJECT is a three year research and development project that focuses on the challenges rural educators must deal with in providing quality educational experiences for children attending the many small schools in Newfoundland and Labrador.  During the life of the project, the faculty's journal, The Morning Watch, will be used periodically as a vehicle to share with the province's educators issues, concerns and questions (and hopefully, some answers) being generated by this project.

 In a previous article in this series (Mulcahy, 1991) an argument was presented pointing out the necessity and desirability of developing a distinctive curricular approach for learning and teaching in multi-grade classrooms.  The argument was based largely on the problems the current provincial curriculum creates for multigrade teachers.  In the first part of this article I would like to further explicate the dilemma confronting the teachers of this province whose classroom situation is "abnormal" (not fitting the accepted norm of one teacher, one grade).

 In the second part of this paper, I will begin the process of exploring the kinds of changes in thinking about both multi-grade classrooms and curriculum that must take place in order for such a distinctive model to emerge.  The focus of this article will be the need for various educational constituencies in the province to acknowledge, recognize and accept the fact that multi-grade classrooms have been, are, and will increasingly continue to be a significant dimension of our educational system.
 

The Dilemma Confronting Multi-Grade Teachers

 Grouping children of different ages, grades, and levels for instructional purposes is a universal phenomenon.  Sometimes this is done out of administrative necessity in order to deal with low or declining enrolments; sometimes it is done on the basis of a belief that such groupings are educationally beneficial for the children involved.  Whatever the reasons for such organizational decisions, the problems or opportunities that multigrade/multi-age groupings present to the classroom teacher are very much a function of the characteristics of the SI official" curriculum context of that educational setting.

 To understand the dilemma facing rural teachers in Newfoundland, one needs to be aware of those aspects or characteristics of this province's official curriculum that most directly impact on learning and teaching in multi-grade classrooms.  An attempt to delineate key concepts is somewhat problematic.  Curriculum orientations and curriculum contexts are very complex entities; any attempt at brief depiction of selected aspects of them runs the risk of oversimplification and even distortion.  Furthermore, curriculum views and positions within the province are not universally shared and are quite dynamic, constantly changing and shifting.  The following portrayal should be read with these qualifications in mind.

 The key words for understanding the provincial curriculum context are
"controlled", "prescribed", "graded" and "uniform".  The term "curriculum" is generally taken to refer to the "Program of Studies" which is the list of subjects that are to be offered in schools.  All decisions regarding this program of studies are the responsibility and are under the centralized control of the provincial Department of Education.  Fundamental to this centralized control is the notion of "one best system" or "one size fits all".  There is a strong belief in the educational view that, as far as is possible, each school, each grade, and each student in the province should have the identical curriculum.  Uniformity equals equality.

 At present, primary/elementary schools are required to offer instruction in ten subject areas.  The official Program of Studies and the various curriculum guides prescribe objectives and content/topics that must be "covered" in each grade for each subject.  Time allotments per subject, day, and week are also indicated.  Textbooks are also chosen and "authorized" by the province and provision is made so that in most subject areas each student receives her/his own copy of each prescribed text.  In some situations these textbooks become the curriculum.

 The organizational image that informs and dominates the development of this centrally controlled, content oriented, prescribed, grade specific curriculum is the single grade classroom found primarily in the few, larger, urban centres.  This image does not reflect the majority of primary/elementary classrooms in the rural areas of the province whose multigrade organization does not fit the urban pattern.

 Teachers working in single grade settings are quick to point out that this prescribed curriculum is in their view "overcrowded" and fails to take into consideration the considerable range of abilities and achievement levels within their single grades.  Given this, the curricular challenge facing the multi-grade teacher is quite daunting.  In a multi-grade classroom a single teacher may have responsibility for a group of children who are "officially" in two, three, four or more grades.  A multi-grade teacher has the legal responsibility, therefore, of "covering" the prescribed content for twenty to forty subjects.

 Teachers in Newfoundland and Labrador struggling with this problem have described their difficulties generally in terms of 'lime" and "coverage".  Comments such as the following are typical of those made by multi-grade teachers in the province who participated in the SMALL SCHOOLS CURRICULUM PROJECT survey:
 

 I feel that the amount of time that I have for each grade is very limited.  I am very concerned with completing the prescribed curriculum for each grade.

 My biggest concern is covering all the material needed to be completed in each grade and doing a good job.

 Until recently, the challenge of a multi-grade situation was one that these teachers have had to face alone.  Left more or less to their own devices, rural educators in Newfoundland and Labrador have attempted to deal with the curricular challenge of multi-grading in a variety of ways.  Three such approaches are described below.

 The principal characteristic of the first approach is segregation.  The teacher makes a clear distinction between each grade, each subject, and each group of children in the classroom.  The children in each grade are seated separately.  For example, the children in grade two would all sit together, as would the children in grade three and grade four.  The teacher would then attempt to teach each group each subject in turn.  There would be a grade four math period and a grade five math period and so on.  The teacher's intention would be to cover as much of the prescribed curriculum as she/he could in the given time.  This is the oldest and most traditional of the three approaches but it is one that is still quite common particularly when dealing with certain subject areas.

 In another approach, the teacher attempts to cover the different grade specific curriculums in alternative years.  For example, a teacher who has a four/five class will one year teach the prescribed grade five Social Studies course to the ' whole class; then the following year teach the prescribed grade four social studies curriculum.  This, in effect, means that in any given year, one segment of the class is encountering the intended curriculum for either the following or the previous year.

 A "third" approach has the teacher experimenting with various forms of subject, grade, and subject/grade integration.  The teacher attempts to cover the prescribed objectives and content for the two or three years by linking them thematically.  The teacher selects a topic or theme that might be appropriate for as many grades as possible and then designs learning activities that will enable children in the various grades to meet their grade specific objectives.  Expectations in terms of student performance and achievement are differentiated according to grade level expectations.

 Some teachers use only one of these approaches, others a combination of all three.  Some curriculum areas lend themselves better to one or another of these approaches.  For example, it is generally felt that math has to be taught separately; nonsequential courses such as social studies can be, fairly easily, taught alternatively; language arts lends itself most readily to a cross grading, thematic approach.

 Each of these approaches, however, is deemed problematic.  Trying to maintain a strict distinction between each grade and subject and cover the whole of the prescribed curriculum is impossible: a single teacher simply does not have the time or the energy to teach or to prepare all the subjects for all the grades as prescribed.  Without guidelines, advice or training the teacher is left to make decisions about what to include and exclude.

 One of the problems with the second or "rotation" approach is that not all areas of learning can be so easily manipulated in this alternating way.  This approach also raises some questions about the original curriculum design of such programs if they can be so arbitrarily juxtaposed.

 The integrated/thematic approach, which is probably the most educationally sound and promising one, is also perceived as problematic in this context for several reasons.  Many teachers feel that they do not have the knowledge and skill to do the kind of analysis and curriculum development that this approach demands.  Those teachers with more confidence in terms of knowledge and skill point out that such approaches require an enormous amount of time and energy that they simply don't have.

 The more fundamental problem with each of these approaches is that the touchstone for each of them is the existing curriculum: a curriculum designed and developed to be delivered in single grade classrooms.  The onus is left to the classroom teacher to invent ways in which this grade specific curriculum can be adapted and fitted to a multi-grade situation.  The problem is the common one of trying to make the square peg fit into the round hole.  This can only be done by whittling away at the peg or reshaping the hole.  Such solutions are hardly desirable or possible.

 Because of these fundamental difficulties, rural educators in Newfoundland and Labrador and elsewhere, for some time now, have been calling for a distinctive curricular approach to multi-grade situations (Riggs, 1987; CEA, 1992), an approach that would be responsive to their particular milieu.
 

 One of the goals of the SMALL SCHOOLS CURRICULUM PROJECT is to respond to the need for a distinctive curricular approach to multi-grade classrooms.  The intention is to develop a curriculum model specifically for multi-grade classrooms.  This model would be reflective of and responsive to the contextual realities and challenges of rural schools and multigrade settings.  Having accepted this as a goal for the project the first step in this process of development is trying to settle on a suitable point of departure for the task.  Where and how should one begin?  What assumptions or beliefs should inform this process of development?  The answer to the question of an appropriate departure point was supplied by a multi-grade classroom teacher.

 One of the methods of inquiry being used in the SMALL SCHOOLS CURRICULUM PROJECT is semi-structured interviews with multi-grade classroom teachers.  One of the questions I always ask as part of the interview process is: How could the various educational agencies such as the Department of Education, the Faculty of Education at Memorial University, and the NTA help teachers with the demands and challenges of multigrade classrooms?

 In one such interview session, a primary teacher, whose multi-grade classroom consisted of students in kindergarten, grade one, two and three responded, "THEY COULD START BY ACKNOWLEDGING WE EXIST".

 Perhaps, this is the most important point of departure in such a curriculum development task: ACKNOWLEDGE, RECOGNIZE, AND ACCEPT THE REALITY AND EXISTENCE OF MULTI-GRADE CLASSROOMS.

 Small schools and multi-grade classrooms have been, are, and will continue to be a significant feature of our educational system.  This may seem like a rather obvious thing to say.  Until very recently, however, the prevalence or even the existence of multi-grade classrooms in this province has been something of a well kept secret.  One could go so far as to say that until very recently, "officially", they did not exist.

 Linda Doody, a Language Arts Coordinator with the Bonavista-TrinityPlacentia School Board and who has done extensive research on multigrading, has pointed out that previous to 1989 one would bg hard pressed to find a single reference to multi-graded classrooms in any provincial curriculum documents.  Multi-grade teachers participating in this current research project were asked if their teacher education programs at the Faculty of Education prepared them directly or indirectly for teaching in multi-graded classrooms.  The near unanimous response has been negative.  With a few notable exceptions it was seldom if ever mentioned.  A review of the publications and newsletters of the Newfoundland Teachers' Association reveals very few articles that addressed or even acknowledged the existence of multi-grade classrooms.  The very title of one such article by John Sutherland - "Small Schools: the overlooked universe of elementary schooling in rural Newfoundland and Labrador' - is illustrative of the point being made.

 At the district level some boards have attempted to address the needs of multi-grade classrooms.  However, based on the current survey responses, district initiated workshops/inservice that focused specially on the special needs of multi-grade teaching were, for the most part, few and far in between.

 Apparently, all educational constituencies collectively decided to act as if multi-grade classrooms did not exist.  Sever al respondents in this study reported that they had not known multi-grade classes even (still) existed until they arrived at their assigned schools.

 This province is hardly unique in neglecting this common characteristic of rural schools (or for that matter in ignoring rural education in general).  In many educational jurisdictions it has, historically, been a fairly common practice to ignore the special needs of rural areas.  Alan De Young (1987) has pointed out that "the history of American education has been primarily an urban history".  Barbara Jean Jones (1987) surveyed American preservice programs for rural environments and concluded:
 

 Pre-service programs offered by teacher-training institutions have primarily been campus and urban based with little thought of the need for the specialized training for those educators who might select to work in a rural environment.  This reflects what Jonathan Sher called 'decades of relative obscurity' for rural education (p. 3).

 These criticisms can just as easily be applied to most other Canadian contexts.  A national survey conducted for the Canadian Education Association (1991) found "no evidence of any special curricula designed for multi-grade classes".  This same report found the preparation of teachers for the particular demands and dynamics of multi-grade teaching to be equally lacking:
 

 The majority of teachers currently teaching multi-grade classes (84.1%) had no special training for these classes.  Only a few reported in-service work provided some help, while others stated that no specific courses or programs on this kind of classroom were available to them.

 Although there have been multi-grade classrooms for a long time, teacher education institutions have chosen to ignore them.  Many faculties of education in the past opted not to place their student teachers in such settings (p. 41).

 Many possible reasons can be advanced to explain this lack of attention.  One explanation is grounded in the false belief that these classrooms are an isolated anomaly; coupled with this is the equally false expectation that further consolidation and resettlement will soon eliminate the need for such classrooms.  In actuality Newfoundland is very much a rural province of small schools and multi-graded classrooms.  Currently, there are over seven hundred multi-grade classrooms in more than one hundred and seventy schools.  This represents thirty seven percent of all schools in Newfoundland; furthermore, multi-grade classrooms exist in more than seventy percent of primary/elementary schools situated in rural areas.

 As part of SMALL SCHOOLS CURRICULUM PROJECT each school district was sent a questionnaire to try and determine the projected increase in multi-grading in this province.  Preliminary survey analysis indicates that due to declining enrolments there is going to be a significant increase in multi-grading in both rural and urban schools in the next five years.  It is time that multi-grade classrooms be acknowledged, accepted.
 

 Recently, multi-grade classrooms are starting to receive a little more attention in this province.  One can now find at least a reference or two in the latest provincial curriculum documents.  Multi-grade teachers in the field have identified the kind of work the Department has done in the area of the science curriculum as being very helpful.  More districts have initiated some curriculum development work and organized in-service workshops.  This past spring, for example, Nova Consolidated and Green Bay Integrated organized professional development sessions specifically for their multi-grade teachers.  Earlier initiated activities by Boards such as Avalon North, Bonavista-Trinity-Placentia, and the Western Integrated are continuing.

 The National Conference on Small Schools was held in Newfoundland for the first time in May of last year (1991) at Deer Lake.  The recent provincial Royal Commission on education has highlighted the existence of small schools and multi-grade classrooms.  The SMALL SCHOOLS CURRICULUM PROJECT has received funding support from the NTA, the Department of Education and the Faculty of Education R & D committee.  The Economic Recovery Commission has called for the establishment of a Centre for the Training of Rural Teachers, and the Faculty of Education is in the process of developing a new graduate course in Rural Education that will be offered in the Winter Semester of 1993.

 This recognition and these activities are good news for rural educators who have struggled on their own for a long time.  The process of recognition has begun.  However, a fundamental point remains to be resolved.  What is to be the focus of our collective efforts?  Will we concentrate our efforts on finding new solutions to the old problem: how to make the square peg fit the round hole, how to make a single grade urban curriculum work in a multi-grade rural classroom?  Perhaps the way forward lies in redefining the problem.  If so, then the process of curriculum inquiry must focus on developing a round peg! 

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