Shuying (Sean) Li's homepage

Curriculum Foundation
major figures in curriculum foundation, various schools of curriculum development, and current trends in curriculum especially the multi-disciplinary curriculum integration

Curriculum Inquiry
look at the existing research inquiries to curriculum studies

Multi-Disciplinary Curriculum Integration
This is a fashionable work in the contemporary China where comprehensive education reform is under way.

Three Types of Curriculum Studies

Planned Curriculum (of various levels: national, provincial/states, school, classroom, etc.)
Enacted Curriculum (of various levels: national, provincial/states, school, classroom, etc.)
Experienced Curriculum (especially by the teacher, for example, certain parts of the classroom curriculum can not be planned, predicted, teachers need to act sensitively, thoughtfully, tactfully in responding the actual moment)

Five Conceptions of Curriculum: Their Roots and Implications for Curriculum Planning (summary from Elliot W. Eisner and Elizabeth Vallance )

1. The cognitive process approach to curri:

Focus: on the "how" instead of the "what" of education; on the child and its learning process;

Purpose of the approach to curri: to develop the curri so as to sharpen the learner's intellectual process and a set of content-independent general cognitive skills that can be applied to learning virtually anything; It sees the learner as an interactive and adaptive element in a system which, if given the correct intellectual tools, could grow almost indefinitely.

The task of educators and curriculum specialists, is to identify the most salient and efficient intellectual processes through which learning occurs and to provide the setting and structure for their development.

Root: 19^th century tradition of faculty psychology, believing that the key to learning is to develop the muscles of "mind". (Jerome Bruner, Robert Gagne, etc)

Note: This is a very popular approach in the present time.

2. Curriculum Technology Approach

Focus on the technology by which knowledge is communicated and "learning" is facilitated.

The purpose is to develop a technology of instruction, in other words, how can the materials be presented to learners efficiently. Curriculum is viewed as a technological process.

The language of this approach is of production: school as a supply and demand system, curriculum as an input to that system, system analysis, output, cybernetic models, biofeedback mechanisms, stimulus and reinforcement,

Curriculum technologist' s Assumption: learning occur in certain systematic and predictable ways and that it can be made more efficient if only a powerful method for controlling it can be perfected.

3. Self-actualization approach:

Strong orientation to personal purpose and personal integration, child-centered, autonomy and growth oriented.

Curriculum is viewed as providing personally satisfying consummatory experience.

Education is seen as an enabling process to provide the means to personal liberation and development.

Schooling is a vital and potentially enriching experience, the content as present experience; It implies a need to break the bond, to change. It is a reformist and reconstructionist in a very personalized curriculum sense. Schooling as a stage in the life process, would provide both the content and tools for further self discovery.

Language of this approach: of humanism, of existentialism, of existential psychology, life world, integrative, experience.

Self-actualizers (Maxine Greene, Abraham Maslow, Fred Newmann, Donald Oliver, Kenneth Benne, etc.)

4. Social reconstruction-relevance approach:

Strong emphasis on the role of curri and education content within a larger social context. Stress the social needs over the individual needs, social reform and responsibility to the future of society are also primary.

Schools, more than other institutions, are called to serve as an agent for social change.

Education and curriculum are examined in terms of their relation to the social issues of the day. Social values, political positions, are clearly stated.

School is seen as the bridge between what is and what might be, between the real and the ideal, both present and future oriented.

Social reconstructionists and reformists demand individual be better equipped to deal with change but be educated to intervene actively to shape the change. (for example, peace education)

5. Academic rationalism approach:

Very traditionally bound,

Most concern with enabling the young to acquire the tools to participate in the cultural tradition and with providing access to the greatest ideas and objects that man has created.

Providing the child with opportunities to acquire the most powerful products of man's intelligence in the established disciplines.

Focus more on classics, heritage,

To become educated means to be able to read and understand the great heritage. Strong emphasis on structure of knowledge.

Substantial change has been undergoing.

Cf. 1. Philosophical categories: pragmatism, realism, idealism, humanism;

Element categories: student-centered, teacher-centered, society centered, subject matter centered;

Limits of the categorization: Simplified, oversimplified,

Advantages: more sensitive to the conflicting views in curri study,

Cross-disciplinary Curriculum Development

@ 1999, Shuying (Sean) Li, Email: shuying@ied.edu.hk Tele: 1-780-432-4340(home); 432-4924 (fax); 1-780-492-8284 (office)