Curriculum

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In formal education, a curriculum (plural curricula) is the set of courses, and their content, offered at a school or university. As an idea, curriculum stems from the Latin word for race course, referring to the course of deeds and experiences through which children grow and mature in becoming adults.

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Curricula Vector (save-download to view-print: [1] click thumbnail image; [2] follow directions to linked page.)
Curricula Vector (save-download to view-print: [1] click thumbnail image; [2] follow directions to linked page.)

In The Curriculum, the first textbook published on the subject, in 1918, John Franklin Bobbitt said that curriculim, as an idea, has its roots in the Latin word for race-course, explaining the curriculum as the course of deeds and experiences through which children become the adults they should be, for success in adult society. Furthermore, the curriculum encompasses the entire scope of formative deed and experience occurring in and out of school, and not experiences occurring in school; experiences that are unplanned and undirected, and experiences intentionally directed for the purposeful formation of adult members of society. (cf. image at right.)

To Bobbitt, the curriculum is a social engineering arena. Per his cultural presumptions and social definitions, his curricular formulation has two notable features: (i) that scientific experts would best be qualified to and justified in designing curricula based upon their expert knowledge of what qualities are desirable in adult members of society, and which experiences would generate said qualities; and (ii) curriculum defined as the deeds-experiences the student ought to have to become the adult he or she ought become.

Hence, he defined the curriculum as an ideal, rather than as the concrete reality of the deeds and experiences that form people to who and what they are.

Contemporary views of curriculum reject these features of Bobbitt's postulates, but retain the basis of curriculum as the course of experience(s) that forms human beings in to persons. Personal formation via curricula is studied at the personal level and at the group level, i.e. cultures and societies (e.g. professional formation, academic discipline via historical experience). The formation of a group is reciprocal, with the formation of its individual participants.

Although it formally appeared in Bobbitt's definition, curriculum as a course of formative experience also pervades John Dewey's work (who disagreed with Bobbitt on important matters). Although Bobbitt's and Dewey's idealistic understanding of "curriculum" is different from current, restricted uses of the word, curriculum writers and researchers generally share it as common, substantive understanding of curriculum.

In formal education or schooling (cf. education), a curriculum is the set of courses, course work, and content offered at a school or university. A curriculum may be partly or entirely determined by an external, authoritative body (i.e. the National Curriculum for England in English schools). In the U.S., each state, with the individual school districts, establishes the curricula taught. Each state, however, builds its curriculum with great participation of national academic subject groups selected by the United States Department of Education, e.g. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) for mathematical instruction. In Australia each state's Education Department establishes curricula. UNESCO's International Bureau of Education primary mission is studying curricula and their implementation worldwide.

Curriculum means two things: (i) the range of courses from which students choose what subject matters to study, and (ii) a specific learning program. In the latter case, the curriculum collectively describes the teaching, learning, and assessment materials available for a given course of study.

Currently, a spiral curriculum (or tycoil curriculum) is promoted as allowing students to revisit a subject matter's content at the different levels of development of the subject matter being studied. The constructivist approach, of the tycoil curriculum, proposes that children learn best via active engagement with the educational environment, i.e. discovery learning.

A crucial aspect for learning, understanding by stimulating the imagination, is absent in the so-called "neo-conservative curriculum" that stresses the ineffective aspects of knowledge amounts and of logico-mathematical thinking, i.e. rote learning.[1][2]

Crucial to the curriculum is the definition of the course objectives that usually are expressed as learning outcomes' and normally include the program's assessment strategy. These outcomes and assessments are grouped as units (or modules), and, therefore, the curriculum comprises a collection of such units, each, in turn, comprising a specialised, specific part of the curriculum. So, a typical curriculum includes communications, numeracy, information technology, and social skills units, with specific, specialized teaching of each.

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  1. ^ Norman, R. (2000) Cultivating Imagination in Adult Education Proceedings of the 41st Annual Adult Education Research.
  2. ^ Egan, K. (1992). Imagination in Teaching and Learning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Bobbitt, John Franklin. The Curriculum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
  • Jackson, Philip W. "Conceptions of Curriculum and Curriculum Specialists." In Handbook of Research on Curriculum: A Project of the American Educational Research Association, edited by Philip W. Jackson, 3-40. New York: Macmillan Pub. Co., 1992.
  • Pinar, William F., William M. Reynolds, Patrick Slattery, and Peter M. Taubman. Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses. New York: Peter Lang, 1995.
  • Kelly, A.V. (1989) The Curriculum: theory and practice 3rd Ed
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