Curriculum Construction

Walker, D. (1989). Fundamentals of Curriculum. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace. pp. 2- 33.

• Definition of curriculum
  • “The curriculum refers to the content and purpose of an educational program together with their organization.”, (Walker, 1989, p.5)
  • “So long as people disagree about what kind of education is best for humanity, they will prefer different definitions of curriculum” , (Walker, 1989, p.6)
  • “What we call the curriculum is a multifaceted whole made up of the relationships between content, purpose, time, and individual and institutional actions as perceived and interpreted by various parties.”, (Walker, 1989, p.7)
• Curriculum content
  • “People often find it difficult to make a summary or abstract of the main point of a message. To program computers to carry this out once seemed a relatively straightforward task, but it has proven to be unexpectedly difficult and has not yet been accomplished.”, (Walker, 1989, p.10)

• “The content of a school curriculum is no more mysterious that the thoughts, images, and plans cognitive scientists tidy routinely”, (Walker, 1989, p.12)

• Curriculum’s Purpose
  • “This who give primacy to intellectual aims argue that schooling is first and foremost a way to bring the next generation info possession of humanity’s accumulated store of knowledge and to equip them to preserve it and add to it”, (Walker, 1989, p.13)
  • “Those who maintain that social aims should come first argue that schools are social institutions created and sustained by the social order to serve whatever ends it sees fit”, (Walker, 1989, p.13)
    • “The purpose of schooling, advocates of this position maintain, is to prepares such citizens”, (Walker, 1989, p.13)
  • “Those who urge that priority be given to personal aims argue that all human beings are unique individuals and deserve an education that utilizes each individual’s unique potential”, (Walker, 1989, p.5)
  • “A common problem is how to divide a major purpose into smaller purposes and then recombine the subordinate purposes so that the student achieves the larger purpose”, (Walker, 1989, p.14)
  • Blooms’ Taxonomy – Bloom, Benjamin S. 1956. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: the Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. N.Y.: McKay
    • Cognitive Domain
      • Knowledge
        • Knowledge of specifics
        • Knowledge of ways and means of dealing with specifics
        • Knowledge of universals and abstractions in a field
      • Comprehension
        • Translation
        • Interpretation
        • Extrapolation
      • Application
      • Analysis
        • Analysis of elements
        • Analysis of relationships
        • Analysis of organizational principles
      • Synthesis
        • Production of a unique communication
        • Production of a plan or a proposed set of operations
        • Derivation of a set of abstract relations
      • Evaluation
        • Judgment in terms of intended evidence
        • Judgment in semis of external criteria
    • Affective Domain
      • Receiving (attending)
        • Awareness
        • Willingness to receive
        • Controlled or selected attention
      • Responding
        • Acquiescene in responding
        • Willingness to respond
        • Satisfaction in response
      • Valuing
        • Acceptance of a value
        • Preference for a value
        • Commitment
      • Organization
        • Conceptualization of a value
        • Organization of a value system
      • Characterization by a value or value complex
        • Generalized set
        • Characterization
  • “Curiously, the greatest contemporary challenge to the common sense notion of purpose in education comes not from methodological objections of scientists or philosophers of science but from political and social doctrines, specifically from the dialectical materialism of Hegel and Marx and their followers. They argue that people’s actions reflect their material interests and that expressions of purpose only used to hide their true motive of self-interest. ”, (Walker, 1989, p.17)
• Curriculum Organization
  • “Curricula, therefore, extend over years of time and may require the coordinated action of thousands of teachers and principals in schools throughout a city, country, state, or nation. Achieving such coordination a a gigantic logistical challenge. It is remarkable that schools do as well as they do.”, (Walker, 1989, p.18)
  • “In any real curriculum, content, purpose, and organization form one whole, the curriculum itself, which may be more or less elaborately organized.”, (Walker, 1989, p.14)
  • Main aspects:
    • Scope
    • Sequence
    • Schedule
    • Content x Behavior Grids
    • Curriculum Design
• Curriculum Decisions and Actions
  • “All that you get now with a position of authority over curriculum decisions is a seat at the “game” of curricular influence – and you have to play that position into influence over what happens in schools and classrooms. To do this you have to know where the floating crap game is today, what the current rules of the game are, who are the other pairs, what’s at stake, and hot how play the game.”, (Walker, 1989, p.22)
  • “The curriculum of early schooling determines the distribution of various forms and levels of skill and knowledge within a society and therefore affects nearly all aspect of society , including national character, politics, and national economic competitiveness.”, (Walker, 1989, p.23)
  • “Schools have never before been able to change their curricula at anything like the pace required to keep up with these expanding frontiers of knowledge”, (Walker, 1989, p.25)
  • “Steadily more radical measures will be forced upon schools unless and until they demonstrate can ability to deliver programs that satisfy the public. This clearly plenty of curriculum work to be done.”, (Walker, 1989, p.25)
  • Seven important characteristics of curriculum practice:
    • The curriculum is a cultural artifact.
    • The curriculum takes on a multiplicity of forms.
    • What happens in the classroom is the primary focus of curriculum work.
    • The curriculum is deeply embedded in several contexts.
    • The responsibility of curriculum practice is shared widely.
    • Those responsible for curriculum practice are distributed widely in a loose network of persons and organizations.
    • All curriculum work favors some human values at the expense of others.
  • “A curriculum is thus a product of some form of collective choice, often extend over decades of time and spreading gradually and differentially throughout a culture. It could be other than it is if the cultural group behaved differently than it does, but widespread, substantial, sustained curriculum change requires cultural change, either as cause, cofactor, or consequence”, (Walker, 1989, p.26)
  • “To understand curricula, then, we must interpret them in context.”, (Walker, 1989, p.26)
  • “Then the various influences are consistent with one another and with the written documents, the the documents may be said to fairly represent the curriculum. But it is a grave error to suppose that changing the documents will, by itself, change the curriculum students experience.”, (Walker, 1989, p.26)
  • “Similarly, the concept of curriculum could be extended to community organizations, museums, the mass media, and a host of other influences if and when they adopt an explicit educational purpose.”, (Walker, 1989, p.27)
  • “One reason why so many efforts at curriculum reform fail or go awry is that planners give too little thought to how innovative curriculum will fit into all of these contexts.”, (Walker, 1989, p.27)

Eisner, E. (1994). The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. (3rd. Edition). New York: MacMillan. pp. 47-86.

• What is a curriculum
  • “Curriculum ideologies are defined as beliefs about what schools should teach, for what ends, and for what reasons” (Eisner, 1994, p.47)
  • “For some the government has no business supporting the arts, and for others the school has no business teaching adolescents about sex.” (Eisner, 1994, p.48)
• School as a factory
  • “The school becomes viewed as an organization that runs out a product – a student – whose knowledge and skills are subject to the same kinds of standards and quality control criteria that are applied to other industrial products.” (Eisner, 1994, p.49)
  • “When children are regarded as passive receptacles to be filled rather than active, stimulus-seeking organisms, bolting down desks in rows roes makes sense. If they are thought of as stimulus-seeking organisms, the the classroom is likely to have a very different look.” (Eisner, 1994, p.49)
• Science vs. Art
  • “For Piaget (1973) the pinnacle of cognitive achievement is found in the scientist. For page, the human as scientist, rather than as artist, is the end-state of cognitive growth.” (Eisner, 1994, p.50)
  • “If we believe that Piaget’s cognitive structures correctly define a hierarchy of human cognitive attainment, the works of a Mozart, a Matisse, or a Balanchine are likely to be diminished. ” (Eisner, 1994, p.50)
• Covert objectives of education
  • “Thus, understanding the covert ways in which ideologies operate becomes crucial if they are to be the subject of reflective examination. As long as we remain oblivious to the values that animate our intellectual life, we will be in no position to modify them.” (Eisner, 1994, p.51)
  • “My point here is that regardless of how powerful an ideological view may be in any individual’s or even group’s orientation to the world, it is seldom adequate to determine hat the school curriculum shall be.” (Eisner, 1994, p.51)
  • “Perhaps the major virtue of a democracy is the instantiation of a process that allows individuals to exercise choice, even if at times out of ignorance.” (Eisner, 1994, p.52)
• Curriculum as a continuum
  • “Put another way, sustaining a direction in schooling or maintaining a set of priorities in the curriculum is much more like nurturing a friendship that installing a refrigerator in the kitchen. The latter requires virtually no attention after installation. The same cannot be said of friendship.” (Eisner, 1994, p.)
• Teach for life not for content or control
  • “What most citizens want are good school. ‘Good school’ for most parents means teaching children basic skills, preparing the for the world of work or for college, helping them avoid the evil of drugs, and paying attention to those less central topics and issues that arise for time-to-time and from place-place in schools across the country (Gallup & Cark, 1987)” (Eisner, 1994, p.54)
  • “Schools teach children to be punctual.” (Eisner, 1994, p.54)
  • “Schools also convey to students a need to compete.” (Eisner, 1994, p.54)
  • “It also reinforces the idea that knowledge is fixed and tidy, that smart people possess it, that textbooks contain it, and that the aim of schooling is its orderly transmission (Jackson, 1986)” (Eisner, 1994, p.55)
  • “If, however, an ideology also refers to a shared way of life that teaches a certain worldview or set of values through action, then schools everywhere employ and convey an ideology because they all possess, in practice, a shared was of life or what may be called an operational ideology.” (Eisner, 1994, p.55)
• Curriculum Ideologies
  • Religious Orthodoxy
    • “At first glance it seems that insulation and isolation from mainstream values is simply a form of being neglect or a congenial way to cope with a potential problem of value conflict.” (Eisner, 1994, p.60)
    • “Although not itself a religious ideology, political belief structures can approximate some of the dogmatic features of religious views regarding the ways in which schools should function and the ends they should seek to attain” (Eisner, 1994, p.60)
    • “All of the foregoing ideological views are in one way or another rooted in religious belief. They all share a belief in a supernatural being at the core of their philosophy and some permit no critical analysis of their basic value assumptions.” (Eisner, 1994, p.62)
    • “The claim that man rationality at its best is incapable of fully understanding God’s plan: only arrogance and ignorance would suppose otherwise.” (Eisner, 1994, p.62)
  • Rational Humanism
    • Compte and others believed that the universe in which we live is, in principal, understandable and that through rational methods, best exemplified in science, the working of the clocklike character of the world could be discovered.” (Eisner, 1994, p.63)
    • “Scientific method was the procedure, par excellence , for achieving this enlightened status.” (Eisner, 1994, p.63)
    • “Ideally, the teacher’s behavior is dialectic rather that didactic. It is intended to enable students to provide reasons or their opinions and to find evidence and counterarguments to the views being expressed.” (Eisner, 1994, p.64)
    • “It should be said that although some might feel that the prescription of a common curriculum for a nation of 250 million is utopian, or naive, or ethnocentric, the case Rational Humanists wish to make is that without such commonality some children – most likely those of the poor – will receive an inferior program of studies, this condemning them to a further life of poverty.” (Eisner, 1994, p.66)
    • “As Hutchins (1953) has said, because in a a democracy all who vote rule, all should have the education of rulers.” (Eisner, 1994, p.66)
    • “A nation that has little toleration for ambiguity in its politics and a need for happy endings in its movies is likely to regard Rational Humanism as a bit too intellectual to be appropriate for today’s world.” (Eisner, 1994, p.67)
  • Progressivism
    • “Dewey’s work is rooted in a biological conception of the human being. By this I mean that he regards the human being as a growing organism whose major developmental task is to come to terms, thought adaptation or transformation, with the environment in which he or she lives.” (Eisner, 1994, p.67)
    • “Intelligence itself is not fixed, it grows. It is not a thing, it is a process. It is not restricted to a limited sphere of content – words or numbers – but manifested itself wherever and in whatever material problems can be posed and solved.” (Eisner, 1994, p.68)
    • “Indeed, one of the school’s major tasks, according to Dewey (1902), is to create what he calls the educational situations thought which a child becomes increasingly able to deal with ever more complex and demanding problems.” (Eisner, 1994, p.68)
    • “The instantiation of a problem, itself an act of intelligence, provided the conditions for the use of experimental thought in pursuit of its resolution. For Dewey, the ‘complete act of thought’ (1910) – the movement from purpose, to experimental treatment, to assessment of results – so exquisitely exemplified in science, was a model tower which curricula should aspire. ” (Eisner, 1994, p.70)
    • “The artistry in pedagogy is partly one of placement – finding the place within the child’s experience that will enable her to stretch intellectually while avoiding tasks so difficult that failure is assured.” (Eisner, 1994, p.70)
    • “It is precisely the kind of intelligent pedagogical adaptability, this shifting of aims, that Dewey regarded as exemplifying what he called ‘flexible purposing.’” (Eisner, 1994, p.71)
    • “The first is to monitor more closely that it has in the past the performance of schools; this is called accountability. Second, it reiterates in the public forum its national (or state) goals for education.” (Eisner, 1994, p.71)
    • “Schools are remarkably robust institutions, slow to change; it is much easier to talk about innovation that to achieve it. Cuban (1979) describes the situation by making an analogy between the operations of the school and a storm at sea.” (Eisner, 1994, p.72)
  • Critical Theory
    • “Critical Theory is an approach to the study of schools and society that has a s its main function the revelation of the tacit values that underlie the enterprise.” (Eisner, 1994, p.73)
    • “In this sense critical theory is aimed at emancipating (their word) those affected by the schools from the school’s debilitating practices.” (Eisner, 1994, p.73)
    • “Within the context of critical theory, one of the important questions children are taught to ask of practices and policies in schooling and elsewhere is, ‘Whose interests are being served?’” (Eisner, 1994, p.74)
    • “In this way schools encourage in students a dependency on authority, foster one-way communication – from top to bottom – and in general provide a distort view of America history that in turn undermines the kind of social consciousness needed to bring about change.” (Eisner, 1994, p.74)
    • “What both Stenhouse and Freire have in common is their practical efforts to create materials designed to enable their students to understand better the values and conditions that affect their lives.” (Eisner, 1994, p.76)
    • “Critical Theorists, in the main, tell the world what schooling suffers from, but they have a tendency to emphasize criticism rather that construction.” (Eisner, 1994, p.76)
  • Reconceptualism
    • “Schools that intend to prepare students for life mislead when they convert to them the idea that all problems have solutions and that all questions have answers.” (Eisner, 1994, p.78)
    • “Rather that attending solely to the child’s behavior, Reconceptualists believe educators should try to understand the nature of the child’s experience. In other words, the need is to turn from a behavioristic to a phenomenological attitude.” (Eisner, 1994, p.78)
    • “Reconceptualization, like Critical Theory, is an orientation to schooling, indeed to living, that functions through the use of particular perspective rather that through the application of rules.” (Eisner, 1994, p.79)
  • Cognitive Pluralism
    • “As a conception of knowledge, Cognitive Pluralism argues that one of the human being’s distinctive features is the capacity to create and manipulate symbols” (Eisner, 1994, p.79)
    • “Because the quest for meaning, it is argued, is part of human nature, the ability to represent or revere meaning in the various forms in which it can be experienced should be a primary aim of schooling.” (Eisner, 1994, p.80)
    • “‘There are as many worlds, as there are ways to describe it.” (Goodman, 1978)
    • “Its meaning has shifted from a noun to a verb; intelligence for more than a few cognitive psychologists is not merely something you have, but something you do.” (Eisner, 1994, p.81)
    • “If the kind of mind that children can come to own is, in part, influenced by the kinds of opportunities they have to think, and if these opportunities are themselves defined by the kind of curriculum schools provide, then it could be argued that the curriculum itself is, as Bernstein (1971) has suggested, a kind of mind-altering device.” (Eisner, 1994, p.81)
    • “I (Eisner, 1985a) have argued that what is dotted from the school curriculum – what is called the null curriculum – is every bit as important as what is left in.” (Eisner, 1994, p.81)
    • “By creating a wider array of curricular tasks, those that require the use of different forms of intelligence, for example, or depend on different aptitudes, opportunities for success in school are expanded” (Eisner, 1994, p.82)
• “The local control of schools complicates the use of research in schools and classrooms: one never knows if the conditions that existed when the research was undertaken in one educational experiment also prevail in the school or district in which one wishes to implement the experimental practice.” (Eisner, 1994, p.83)
• “Teachers still close the classroom door and do what they know how to do and believe is best for the students they teach. In this sense, chances in the the teacher’s ideology may be among the important changes that can be made in the fouled of education.” (Eisner, 1994, p.)

Noddings, N. (1992). The Challenge to Care in Schools. New York: Teachers College Press. pp. 44-62.

• “Dewey nevertheless admires Plato’s educational scheme in which children were to be educated according to their talents and demonstrated interests. However, he noted that Plato had erred in supposing there were only three categories of useful and admirable qualities. Dewey clearly favored forms of educations that could be tailored to the child, and he recognized a multiplicity of human capacities.” (Noddings, 1992, p.44)
• “The question, ‘What kind of education would I want for them?’ must be supplemented by the question, ‘What kind of education would youI want for them?’” (Noddings, 1992, p.45)
• “Thus, parental interests take on different priorities at different times, and reasonable people differ on what they mean by growth and acceptability.” (Noddings, 1992, p.46)
• “If tests are used at all, they should be given at the request of children (or their parents) who want to learn more about their own talents. By and large interests – not tested capacities – should determine placement.” (Noddings, 1992, p.46)
• “Franklin Bobbitt (1915), the father of modern curriculum theory, suggested that education be organized around human activities: ‘religious activities; civic activities; the duties of one’s calling; one’s family duties; one’s recreations; one’s reading and meditation; and the rest of the things that are done by the complete man or woman’ (p.20)” (Noddings, 1992, p.46)
• “We need a scheme that speaks to the existential heart of life – one that draws attention to our passions, attitudes, connections, concerns, and experienced responsibilities.” (Noddings, 1992, p.47)
• “All of these group associations affect our interpretations of what it means to care in each domain and which domains should have top priority.” (Noddings, 1992, p.47)
• “Central to caring for the physical self is understanding and accepting it s potential and limitations.” (Noddings, 1992, p.48)
• “Although we cannot, and I would not want to, teach our heterogeneous family a particular religion in school, I would hope that they might learn something about the human longing for god or spirit.” (Noddings, 1992, p.49)
• “Another basic interest of the self is occupational.” (Noddings, 1992, p.50)
• “I would hope that all of our children, both girls and boys, would be prepared to do the work of attentive love.” (Noddings, 1992, p.51)
• “But researchers do not seem to see a problem in men’s lack of participation in nursing, elementary school teaching, or jul-time parenting.” (Noddings, 1992, p.51)
• “If we regard our relations with intimate others as central in moral life, we must provide ll our children with practice in caring.” (Noddings, 1992, p.52)
• “Dialogue is also essential in learning how to create and maintain caring relations with intimate others. Unfortunately, there is little real dialogue in classrooms.” (Noddings, 1992, p.53)
• “Part of what is learned in dialogue is interpersonal reasoning – the capacity to communicate, share decision making, arrive at compromises, and support each other in solving everyday problems.” (Noddings, 1992, p.53)
• “Kids do not say no to drugs; that have to say no to other human beings. How do they maintain friendships and status in their peer groups and still say no?” (Noddings, 1992, p.53)
• “Schools today are not supportive places for children with genuine intellectual interests. With rare exceptions, they are not supportive places for students with any genuine or intrinsic interests.” (Noddings, 1992, p.60)
• “In its general form, its an argument against an ideology of control – one in favor of shared living and responsibility, Its first thesis is there are centers of care and concern in which all people share and in which the capacities of all children must be developed.” (Noddings, 1992, p.)
• “A third is that the focus on center of care and the development of capacities must be filtered through and filled out a consideration of differences that are associated with race, sex, ethnicity, and religion.” (Noddings, 1992, p.62)

Dewey, J. (1938/1997). Experience and Education. New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 25-50.

• “The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative.” (Dewey, 1938, p.25)
• “It is to emphasize the fact, first, that young people in traditional schools do have experiences; and, secondly, that the trouble is not the absence of experiences, but their defective and wrong character – wrong and defective from the standpoint of connection with further experience.” (Dewey, 1938, p.27)
• “Unless experience is so conceived that the result is a plan for deciding upon subject-matter, upon methods of instruction and discipline, and upon material equipment and social organization of the school, it is wholly in the air.” (Dewey, 1938, p.28)
• “After the artificial and complex is once institutionally established and ingrained in custom and routine, it is easier to walk in the paths that have been beaten than it is, after taking a new point of view, to work out what is practically involved in the new point of view.” (Dewey, 1938, p.30)
• “From this point of view, the principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after.” (Dewey, 1938, p.35)
• “He must, in addition, have that sympathetic understanding of individuals as individuals which gives him an idea of what is actually going on in the minds of those who are learning. It is, among other things, the need for these abilities on the part of the parent and teacher which makes a system of education based upon living experience a more difficult affair to conduct successfully than it is to follow the patterns of traditional education.” (Dewey, 1938, p.39)
• “A primary responsibility of educators is that they not only be aware of the general principle of the shaping of actual experience by environing conditions, but that they also recognize in the concrete what surroundings are conducive to having experiences that lead to growth.” (Dewey, 1938, p.40)
• “A system of education based upon the necessary connection of education with experience must, on the contrary, if faithful to its principle, take these things constantly into account. This tax upon the educator is another reason why progressive education is more difficult to carry on than was ever the traditional system.” (Dewey, 1938, p.40)
• “The word ‘interaction,’ which has just been used, expresses the second chief principle for interpreting an experience in its educational function and force. It assigns equal rights to both factors in experience – objective and internal conditions.” (Dewey, 1938, p.42)
• “The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of predigested materials. ” (Dewey, 1938, p.46)
• “We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future.” (Dewey, 1938, p.49)