Turning points in curriculum

Marshall, J. D., Sears, J. T., Allen, L. A., Roberts, P. A., & Schubert, W. H. (2007). Turning points in curriculum: A contemporary American memoir (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Merrill Prentice Hall.

Part 1 Contextual panorama for contemporary curriculum work (1897-1946)

Chapter 1. Prelude to contemporary curriculum theory and development

• Curr. history is a continual recurrence of focus on subject matter, learners, and society throughout the 19 century
• Two added elements
  
  • What is worth knowing and experiencing (and worth sharing)? - different responses shift the balance among SM, L, & S; e.g., Schubert's (1980) three schools of curri. - intellectual traditionalist, experientialist, & social behaviorist
    
  • Who decides (and should decide)? - null curriculum (Eisner, 1985); P. Freire
    
• The birth of curr. studies
  
  • How to provide universal education (schooling for the elite until 1890s)
  • Horace Mann & Henry Barnard - promoting universal schooling
  • Charles Eliot led National Educational Association's (NEA) Committee of Ten - the best preparation for college was the same as the best preparation for life
  • Committee of Fifteen: developmental theories (Herbarians - e.g., Child development, recapitulation theory) v. the disciplines of knowledge (Hegelians - e.g., Harris: "five windows of the soul"). Result: a shift from subject to learner as a basis for curri. work.
  • Social behaviorist: G. Stanley Hall started America's first psychological laboratory
  • Dewey's curricular view: a balanced integration of emphasis on subject matter, society, and the child. His central curr. position: the progressive reorganization of subject matter. Arguing for the pedagogic necessity of starting with the psychological and moving to the logical
    
    • Psychological: the concerns and interests of the learner's life world of experience
    • Logical: both the disciplines of knowledge and knowledge accumulated by human beings through everyday experiences
    • Pedagogical process: identifying individual student interests, encouraging students to share these interests within a community of learners, excavating common human interests symbolized by the individually identified interests, tapping a broad array of experiential resources as precedent, and drawing on the fund of written knowledge in pursuit of original interests and the discovery of new interests
      
  • At the turn of the century, Dewey's pragmatic experimentalist educational philosophy, progressive social and educational theory, and experiential and reconstructionist curriculum thinking came to the fore
    
  • Joseph Mayer Rice (1913): Educational progress would only occur if teachers and their leaders were carefully guided, efficiently managed, and systematically controlled. He described the gross ineptitudes, similar to Kozol's (1991) "savage inequalities" between urban and suburban schools
• Struggles surface
  
  • The overwhelming influence of Taylorism (technical efficiency); IQ=potential;
    
  • Edward Thorndike(1924) - founder of ed. psych., test & measurement
  • Dewey: intelligence cannot be reified as test scores
  • Frank Bobbit (social behaviorist): scientific curr. making - activity analysis
  • William Kilpatrick: The Project Method (1918) - integrate curr. around projects that grow from student interests
  • "What are the purposes of education?" (revived by the decline of faculty psychology, the move away from classic subjects, and the influx of new student populations
  • 1920s & 1930s: the heyday of progressive practices. but progressivism never dominated educational thinking or practice because the traditionalist position was kept alive (curri. makng was a top-down, expert-driven enterprise resulting in selection or creation of products to be systematically delivered to students who were assessed on their retention of knowledge and acquisition of skills
• The progressives multiply and divide
  
  • The Eight Year Study (1933-1941): the performance of students from the experimental-progressive schools equaled or exceeded that of students from traditional schools
  • Reconstructionist progressives (foster critical thinking and social action around issues of ethics & justice): George Counts (Dare the school build a new social order? 1932- curricula must be designed to overcome injustice and oppression and create democratic, equitable, fulfilling way of life), Harold Rugg, Theodore Brameld
  • Child-centered ("apolitical") v. social reconstructionist. Dewey called for a deeper look into the difference and find reciprocal relationships between individual and political growth - failed and weakened the collective voice of progressives
    

Part 2 The rise and fall of curriculum specialists (1947-1960)

Chapter 2. Curriculum development at its zenith: curriculum people

• Background: postwar America, an era of hope and optimism
  
• 1947 Chicago Curriculum Theory Conference (Virgil Herrick & Ralph Tyler)
  
• 1956 Benjamin Bloom: Taxonomy of Educational Objectives
  

Chapter 3. Transfer by eminent domain: National interest

• As Cold War escalates, James B. Conant advocates national interest, rather than growth of the individual, as the primary purpose of schooling in Education in a Divided World
  
• The 1950s: revolutionary upheavals in politics, business, pop culture, religion and tech (e.g., Catcher in the Rye, Salinger, 1951; I Love Lucy; My Fair Lady; Lord of the Rings; Brown v Board of Ed.; Little Rock Nine; Elvis Presley...)
  
• 1957 the launching of Sputnik
• Jerome Bruner (1960) The Process of Education - new curri Bible (ties between curr. & natl interest, the lure of science & tech., and public disappointment with school curricula) - a rekindled interest in curr. problems by ed psychologists and concern for school's ability to produce sufficient numbers of scholars, scientists, poets, & lawmakers
  
• "The contribution of university scholars in the creation of the most advanced weapons systems had led the nation's political leadership to look to the university scholars for devising curricula in science and mathematics for the elementary and secondary schools" (Tanner & Tanner, 1980, p. 434)
  
• Result: Teachers became either subject matter specialists or human conduits for the transmission of subject matter knowledge, students became child-scientists, and the curri. worker took a backseat to psychologists and other discipline scholars of the "first rank." Progressive ideals and the democratic aims of American ed. were disappearing
  

Part 3 Reestablishing agency and agendas (1961-1969)

Chapter 4. Muted heretics endure (1961-1964): "Outsiders" (Psychology contributors)

• B. F. Skinner (1958): "Teaching Machines" - radical behaviorist
• Hilda Taba's (1962) Curriculum development: Theory and practice
  
• Technological view of curriculum - efficiency movement (Bruner "automatizing devices")
• In spite of the dominant technorationality, progressive ideas were kept alive (e.g., Huebner: curri. field permits the use of all major disciplinary systems, not only behaviorist psychology; John Goodlad, 1964, critiqued the national curri. reform projects)
  

Chapter 5. Transcending a muddled juncture (1965-1969): Publications

• Background: Godfather, 60 Minutes, Martin Luther King, Jr, ...a decade of political turmoil and social change (transformation from an era of New Frontier innocence and idealism to the realpolitik of the Nixon-Kissinger legacy)
  
• Coroner for conventional curr. making - Joseph Schwab's (1969) The practical: A language for curriculum, diagnosing the curriculum field as moribund - a wake up call for new directions. It is the most significant curriculum publication since Tyler's Basic Principles in Curriculum and Instruction (1950)
• 1965 Chicago curriculum meeting (bases and principles) - curr. field needed to shift from "objective" and empirically based issues to socially oriented, value-based questions by radical thinkers (Michael Apple)
  

Part 4 (Re)shaping the contemporary curriculum field (1970-1983)

Chapter 6. The Renaissance blossoms: Professional organizations and gatherings

• Background: 1970s - overconsumption of tech and natural resources, overindulgence with sexual freedom and freedom of expression, overreliance on federalism and individualism
  
• AERA (formed in 1916, the same year J. Dewey published Democracy and Ed.), Division B (formed in 1964) - "Curriculum & Objectives"
• James Macdonald: A transcendental development ideology of education
• Paulo Friere (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed
  
• The 1970s - new people and ideas emerged in opposition to traditional practices and procedures
• Paradigm: a conceptual framework or way to look at the world composed of knowledge, values, and assumptions that govern activity or inquiry in an academic field such as curri.
  

Chapter 7. From chorus to cacophony: Paradigms and perspectives (Multidimentional, eclectic)

• Background: early 1980s - Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Channel One, USA Today, Star Trek...
  
• Analytically distinctive curriculum paradigms (3 from Schubert, 1986, and 1 from Lather, 1992)
  
  • Predict (the perennial paradigm)
  • Understand (the practical paradigm)
  • Emancipate (the critical paradigm)
  • Deconstruct (the poststructual or postmodern paradigm)
    
• Reconceptualization (Henry Giroux)
• Aesthetic perspective (Elliot Eisner, The Educational Imagination)
• John Goodlad: Curriculum Inquiry: The study of curriculum practice
• Glatthorn (1980)
• Cronbach statistics
• Michael Apple - Ideology and Curriculum
• The multiple perspectives and sophisticated nuances contained within each of them
• "Paradigm wars" (Pinar et al., 1995) - serious rifts
  

Part 5 The uncertainties of contemporary curriculum work (1984-2002)

Chapter 8. Implosion and consolidation: Marginalized voices

• By the mid-1980s, teachers were center stage in the curr. field
  
• Marginalized voices - the business-as-usual mode of improving curri.
  
• The fracturing of theoretical unity & disciplinary cohesion (the end of science in the postmodern era)
  

Chapter 9. Difference that breeds hybridity: Race, reform, and curriculum

• 1983 A Nation at Risk
  
• 1989 President Bush's education summit: took up the cause of accountability and standards,
  
• Goals 2000 and the NCLB (a pedagogy of poverty): from national goals to state assessments - educators lose control
  
• Conflict over national values, priorities, and directions - "cultural wars" of the 1990s (what knowledge is of most worth - regarding growing racial, ethnic, and cultural differences)
• Hybridity: the condition of heterogeneous assembly - the making of sth. out of disparate or incongruent parts or elements (national school reform & theoretical diversity)
  

Chapter 10. Imagining the postmillennial curriculum field

• future & possibilities through the intersections of democracy, globalization, and technology
• The paradox of "consolidated diversity" - communication & community have become not only more challenging but also more crucial to the work of curri.
  

Modernism VS Postmodernism

Modernism

Assumptions

1. Life & the world are mechanical
2. There exists a stable-state universe
3. Curriculum development can be compartmentalized and decontextualized "norm"
4. Goals can be separated from the experience designed to address them

Leading proponents

1. Bobbitt (The Curriculum, 1918): first consider curriculum as a science; curriculum development is precise and predictable, resulting in a tangible product; still the mainstream view in today's schools
   
2. Tyler (Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, 1949): four basic questions (modernist, linear, cause-effect framework
   
   • What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
   • What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purpose?
   • How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?
   • How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?
3. Taba (Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice, 1962): There was a definite order to curriculum development; all curricula are composed of certain elements; seven-step model:
   
   • Diagnosis of needs
   • Formulation of objective
   • Selection of content
   • Organization of content
   • Selection of learning experiences
   • Organization of learning experience
   • Evaluation and means of evaluation
     

Postmodernism

Assumptions

1. Life is organic, not mechanical
2. The universe is dynamic, not stable
3. Curriculum development is not passive acceptance of steps, but evolves from action with the system in particular contexts
4. Goals emerge oftentimes from the very experiences in which people engage

Leading proponents

1. Giroux (1991): encourage the achievement and employment of multiple awareness
   
2. Lyotard (1992): play the game without rules, and from the very playing, to invent new rules; our challenge is not that of supplying a clear reality, but inventing allusions to the conceivable and engaging ourselves in the dynamics of the system
   
3. Doll: four criteria (1993, 4 Rs)
   
   • Richness: players include teachers, students, and interested parties from the wider community; curricula must have some disturbing qualities
     
   • Recursion: stability + change; reflective interaction; no fixed beginning or ending; the curriculum is designed to allow for continually going back to and then incorporating previous points and insights into a growing sense of understanding
     
   • Relations: dialogue between students and teachers; social activity full of surprises
     
   • Rigor: critique validity; cultivate new ideas
     
4. Slattery (?)
5. Pinar (?)
   

Present and future

Hunkins, F. P., & Hammill, P. A. (1994). Beyond Tyler and Taba: Reconceptualizing the curriculum process. Peabody Journal of Education, 69 (3), 4-18.
Keywords: Tyler rationale, Taba, Bobbit, Modernism, Technocrat, postmodernism

Parkay, F. W., & Hass, G. (2005). Curriculum planning: A contemporary approach (7th Ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. (Chapter 2. Social forces: Present and future, pp. 45-58)
Keywords: social forces, developmental tasks, future planning

Cetron, M, & Cetron, K. (2003). A forecast for schools. Educational Leadership, 61 (4).
Keywords: funding, diversity, technology, lifelong learning.

These three articles provide some basic ideas about “where we are” and “where we are headed.”

In this era of rapid social and technological change leading to increasing life complexity and psychological displacement, the educators have to rethink what modern education is and how curricula should be reformed to suit the future needs.

For decades, the modernism-scientistic tradition has been dominating curriculum and curriculum development. Even today, Bobbitt’s curriculum foundation, Ralph Tyler’s four-question rationale, and Hilda Taba’s seven-step model are still the mainstream views regarding curriculum development. However, the newly-emerged challenges, transitions and transformations, as in a post-modernism point of view, have announced that “there is no structure or master narrative in which we can wrap ourselves for comfort.” Education will be at risk if our educators continue to rely on a positivistic certainty in the procedures that Tyler and Taba advocated.

Examining contemporary social forces that influence the curriculum helps curriculum planners to understand the role education can play in shaping a desired future and thus incorporate an unknown future into their work. Among those ten major trends, I think we would draw special attentions to “increasing ethnic and cultural diversity”, “changing values and morality” and “microelectronics revolution”. Based on the understanding of these three fundamental issues, we should be able to deploy futures planning with considering three levels of social forces.

A forecast for schools projected from futurists provided directions for schools by yielding an understanding of societal and economic trends to help schools implement reforms that prepare students more effectively for the changing world. With all those concerns on funding, student population and diversity, technological transformation in the workplace, and needs in lifelong learning, our schools should make early preparations and careful countermeasures in response to the modern, high-tech world with cautious optimism.