My role was to represent an early childhood perspective, of course, with an emphasis on Macomb Projects' work with young children, their families, and technology. What follows summarizes only a few aspects of the panel discussion. My sense is that as early childhood educators, we are fortunate that it is easier to describe access to the early childhood general curriculum than it is to describe what that same term means to adolescents.
Curriculum changes over time as children grow older.
Ideally, the regular early childhood curriculum is a series of integrated meaningful experiences carried out in the context of daily activities as opposed to teaching isolated, discrete skills. The regular early childhood general curriculum is broad, not narrow and closely prescribed. Adapting materials, adapting activities, and adapting tools becomes part of the processes needed to help children access the early childhood general curriculum. It shouldn't come as a surprise that I touted technology as an important set of tools to assist in access. The panel made the point that regular education curriculum is not perfect and undoubtedly needs rethinking and restructuring in some areas, an important consideration for us as we examine early childhood classrooms.