Curriculum Development

Here is a great example of a need for a locally or district based curriculum. This is a picture taken in the 1950's of a woman teaching Inupiaq children about animals. The chalkboard says:

Animals

See the animals' house.
The animals' house is a barn.
The animals like the barn.

For students who have probably never seen a barn, and live in a culture that has a very different view of animals than the Western European one, this lesson must have been utterly incomprehensible. Assuming that the teacher continues by discussing animals that would live in a barn, this unit will continue to be irrelevant. We can only guess at why she is teaching about animals in this way, but I would wager that she is using printed materials made for another culture. A locally designed curriculum with relevant materials would help to solve this problem.