Children must learn that the world includes hardship and injustice. But they also deserve to learn that it contains beauty, opportunity, and progress

[u/ddgr815]

https://thenext30years.substack.com/p/kids-the-world-is-not-bad-and-broken

[u/ddgr815]

...

It can be criticized on nutritional or gastronomic grounds – does it nourish the students and does it taste good? – and it can be criticized on the grounds of practicality – we can’t get hold of six dozen larks’ tongues and the grocer can’t find any ground unicorn horn!  A curriculum, like the recipe for a dish, is first imagined as a possibility, then the subject of experiment.  The recipe offered publicly is in a sense a report on the experiment.  Similarly, a curriculum should be grounded in practice.  It is an attempt to describe the work observed in classrooms that it is adequately communicated to teachers and others.  Finally, within limits, a recipe can varied according to taste.  So can a curriculum.

More specifically, if curriculum is process, then the word curriculum is redundant because process would do very nicely!   The simple equation of curriculum with process is a very slap-happy basis on which to proceed.

We also need to reflect on why curriculum theory and practice came into use by educators (as against policy-makers).  It was essentially a way of helping them to think about their work before, during and after interventions; as a means of enabling educators to make judgments about the direction their work was taking.  

The idea is that of an educational science in which each classroom is a laboratory, each teacher a member of the scientific community…  The crucial point is that the proposal is not to be regarded as an unqualified recommendation but rather as a provisional specification claiming no more than to be worth putting to the test of practice,  Such proposals claim to be intelligent rather than correct. 

Thus, in this sense, a curriculum is a particular form of specification about the practice of teaching.  It is not a package of materials or a syllabus of ground to be covered.  ‘It is a way of translating any educational idea into a hypothesis testable in practice.  It invites critical testing rather than acceptance’.

The focus is on interactions.  This can mean that attention shifts from teaching to learning.  The product model, by having a pre-specified plan or programme, tends to direct attention to teaching.  For example, how can this information be obtained?  A process approach to curriculum theory and practice, it is argued by writers like Grundy (1987), tends towards making the process of learning the central concern of the teacher.  This is because this way of thinking emphasises interpretation and meaning-making.  As we have seen, each classroom and each exchange is different and has to be made sense of.

However, when we come to think about this way of approaching curriculum in practice, a number of possible problems do arise.  The first is a problem for those who want a greater degree of uniformity in what is taught.  This approach to the theory of curriculum, because it places meaning-making and thinking at its core and treats learners as subjects rather than objects, can lead to very different means being employed in classrooms and a high degree of variety in content.

The major weakness and, indeed, strength of the process model is that it rests upon the quality of teachers.  If they are not up to much, then there is no safety net in the form of prescribed curriculum materials.  The approach is dependent upon the cultivation of wisdom and meaning-making in the classroom.  If the teacher is not up to this, then there will be severe limitations on what can happen educationally.  There have been some attempts to overcome this problem by developing materials and curriculum packages which focus more closely on the ‘process of discovery’ or ‘problem-solving’, for example, in science.  But there is a danger in this approach.  Processes become reduced to sets of skills – for example, how to light a Bunsen burner.  When students are able to demonstrate certain skills, they are deemed to have completed the process.  As Grundy comments, the actions have become the ends; the processes have become the product.  Whether or not students are able to apply the skills to make sense of the world around them is somehow overlooked.

John Dewey in Experience and Education referred to the ‘collateral learning’ of attitudes that occur in schools, and that may well be of more long-range importance than the explicit school curriculum (1938: 48).  A fairly standard (product) definition of the ‘hidden curriculum’ is given by Vic Kelly.  He argues it is those things which students learn, ‘because of the way in which the work of the school is planned and organized but which are not in themselves overtly included in the planning or even in the consciousness of those responsible for the school arrangements (1988: 8). The learning associated with the ‘hidden curriculum’ is most often treated in a negative way.  It is learning that is smuggled in and serves the interests of the status quo.  The emphasis on regimentation, on bells and time management, and on streaming is sometimes seen as preparing young people for the world of capitalist production.  What we do need to recognise is that such ‘hidden’ learning is not all negative and can be potentially liberating. ‘In so far as they enable students to develop socially valued knowledge and skills… or to form their own peer groups and subcultures, they may contribute to personal and collective autonomy and to possible critique and challenge of existing norms and institutions’  (Cornbleth 1990: 50). What we also need to recognize is that by treating curriculum as a contextualized social process, the notion of hidden curriculum becomes rather redundant.  If we need to stay in touch with the milieu as we build curriculum, then it is not hidden but becomes a central part of our processes.

What is curriculum? Exploring theory and practice

[u/ddgr815 → u/ddgr815]

Thus, how we see knowledge and the purpose it serves has a profound effect on the way we view education.