Chapter 3: What is Worthwhile: From Knowing and Needing to Being and Sharing

After 40 years of wandering through the curriculum field as a professor, graduate student, and elementary school teacher, I know well that there is great struggle over the content of curriculum studies. At the same time, however, I am convinced that one central question lies at the base of our efforts. I call this question the what’s worthwhile question. Looking more deeply into this question, I see it as having multiple foci: What is worth knowing, needing, experiencing, doing, being, becoming, sharing, contributing, and wondering?

I became a teacher to convey to the next generation the love of learning that I gleaned in a liberal arts education. I wanted to share attempts to compose my life (Bateson, 1989) that evolved from my experiences as a child and youth with family and friends. As a teacher I daily, even momentarily, asked myself what is worth doing, being, and becoming. Not only did I pose this question for my students, or about them, I asked it for myself and I asked it with my students, colleagues, and friends. In graduate school I strove to find literatures that furthered and challenged my quest to get closer to that which is worthwhile. As realized by shepherd boy, Santiago, in The Alchemist (Coelho, 1988), I became convinced that finding the treasure was less important than the quest, the journey, or the curriculum that leads toward it. This curriculum is sustained by a steadfast gaze toward a life more worth living and a world more worth inhabiting. To embody such a gaze, to encourage it in others, and to find more about it from their experiences has been and continues to be the essence of educational relationships I try to cultivate as a professor.