Systems Love Uniformity. I Never Did.
Most people grow up learning where the edges of the box are. I grew up walking past them without noticing they were supposed to matter. It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t defiance. It was simply that the box never made sense to me—too small, too rigid, too uninterested in the particularities that make a person who they are.
I didn’t know there was a box until other people told me I had stepped out of it.
The First Prism
In elementary school, the science fair was a parade of store‑bought kits: sleek prisms, polished mirrors, tidy instructions. I showed up with a handful of homemade prisms—pieces of window glass, cut into triangles, and, as I discovered in the process was needed in order to control and direct the angle of the refraction, covered on both sides with black construction paper. They worked! Of course. They were based on the function of light. I made them myself, together with my science fair partner, because we had no money to buy a fancy kit (those kits held no interest for me, anyway--I did not want to regurgitate what some company had already done), and we knew that the way light works had to be the same for all prisms. We just had to get the window glass in shape to accommodate the light. Our prisms refracted light just fine. We also won first place.
That was the first time I realized that the world expected conformity, but rewarded originality—quietly, reluctantly, almost by accident.
The Sunday School Exodus
In fourth grade, I led an entire Sunday School class out of the Methodist church and across the street to the Baptist church because the pastor’s answers didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t trying to start a movement. I was trying to find truth. The adults saw disruption; the children saw possibility. The town saw division for years.
I saw a simple fact: when the box doesn’t fit, you walk toward the place where the questions feel alive.
The Children’s Hospital
Years later, I found myself in a children’s hospital where the standard protocols for tracheotomy care were failing children—literally, including my son. I pushed, insisted, refused to accept the “this is how we do it” answer. The hospital restructured its treatments. They hired new staff. Children who would have died began to live. My son, for whom doctors initially held out now hope, is now 47.
Uniformity is efficient. It is also deadly when it ignores the particular.
The Middle Eastern Classroom
In another chapter of my life, the Ministry of Education put men and women in the same classroom for the first time as an outcome of my proposed workshops. The ministry trembled and held its breath. Th teacher participants loved it. The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall. The box simply cracked open, and people walked through. One of the "students" the following year became the first female principal of a boys' school.
Sometimes, the box is nothing more than habit wearing the mask of tradition.
The Question My Daughter Asked
Years later, when I casually referred to my daughter’s college president as “she,” she shook her head and said, “Mom, did you ever know there was a box?”
I laughed, because of course I knew. I had spent my whole life tripping over its edges. I just never accepted its authority.
Why OACD Was Inevitable
People sometimes ask how I came to develop Open Architecture Curricular Design. The truth is simple: if you spend your life refusing to fit into pre‑designed boxes, you eventually build a framework that refuses to put learners into them.
OACD didn’t come from theory. It came from a lifetime of seeing what happens when systems demand uniformity and individuals insist on being particular. It came from prisms made of window glass, from children walking across the street, from hospital wards that needed to change, from classrooms that needed to open.
It came from never mistaking the box for the world.
a post inspired by Open Architecture Curricular Design (Corin, Leaver, and Campbell, eds.), published by Georgetown University Press
book description
A guide to a textbook-free approach to world languages curriculums that will improve learning outcomes
Open architecture curricular design (OACD) is a textbook-free curricular design framework for teaching and learning world languages that integrates all the best practices in world language education to enhance learning efficiency and effectiveness. As editors and pioneers of this method, Corin, Leaver, and Campbell define OACD for world language instructors and second language acquisition researchers from middle school through higher education and beyond.
The book's chapters demonstrate how to use OACD for a wide variety of languages and proficiency levels in government, service academy, and university programs. Topics covered include the use of authentic texts at all levels, learner involvement in the selection of content and activities, and methods of assessment and program evaluation.
reviews
"This groundbreaking volume productively combines theory and practice. Through engaging examples, author-practitioners demonstrate that open architecture curricular design is both effective and feasible. They show how OACD principles―learner agency, instructor mentorship, flexibility, and focus on authentic materials―can be implemented at all levels of language instruction and program design."―Karen Evans-Romaine, professor, University of Wisconsin–Madison
"Corin, Leaver, and Campbell's volume provides readers with an extraordinary introduction to open architecture curricular design (OACD). The volume is extremely helpful for language instructors, program directors, department chairs, and all those responsible for supervising language learning programs in any context precisely because it identifies strategies, through OACD, to identify and build on learner motivation in the context of constantly changing international environments and an ever-renewing source of target-language texts on social media platforms."―Benjamin Rifkin, professor of Russian, provost, and senior VP for academic affairs, Fairleigh Dickinson University
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