School as a Site for Identity Formation

As I was reading this week's reading (in the MUL book), I just kept thinking about something one of the presenters in the FutureLab session at the conference said:
"What sort of curriculum can we make for the kind of people we want to make for the kind of future we want to make?" In other words, we need to stop thinking about curriculum first (maybe we don't think about curriculum first), and start thinking first about the kind of society we want, the kind of people that we need to have in that society, and then work on the kinds of curriculum that make those kinds of people.

As mentioned in the article, we value people who are multi-layered, we seem to value the diverse workplace, and civic pluralism seems to be the model for the future (I won't go on a rant about how our country is failing in this regard here...), and we need to work on building a curriculum that allows for that sort of identity formation. School is a key place of identify formation, perhaps even as influential as the home because it is at school that students begin to figure out how their private identities operate in a public space; it is in school that students learn to navigate a world that they have little control over, how to act like themselves while working toward goals they may not have chosen. Particularly for young people who are not involved in many other social activities, school is the one of the first and main sites of socialization. So, if we want children to be socialized in an environment that creates multi-layered, multi-modal people, we need to create an environment (not just a curriculum) that allows for this type of identity formation.

I tend to get annoyed when articles make this kind of a call to action without offering some sort of possible solution for how we get there, so I appreciated that Cope and Kalantzis didn't just stop here with a call to action: the last few pages (and, really, the entire book...) function as a way to say, "THIS IS HOW WE CREATE THESE SORTS OF LEARNERS!" I've appreciated not having to read all of this book, but I almost feel like after this class is over I would like to read it from start to finish because I feel like I'm having a bit of a non-linear experience with it, but nevertheless I think that the ideas we've had around available designs and SOCT (which is the acronym I think we should all adopt) all work to help us create the kinds of students we want to create. These goals seem lofty, but it's entirely possible to tweak our framework just a bit to help students become the kinds of people they need to be.

How many words is this supposed to be? 451, right?