Reflection Week 8

Week 8

Continued: Curriculum Theory and Practice

The following are the four ways of approaching curriculum theory and practice:

Curriculum as a body of knowledge to be transmitted.

• Curriculum cannot be equated with a syllabus which in essence means a concise statement or table of the heads of a discourse, the contents of a treatise, and the subjects of a series of lectures. It is connected with courses leading to examination. This view of the curriculum limits planning to a consideration of the content or the body of knowledge that may be transmitted. 

Curriculum as an attempt to achieve certain ends in students - product.

• However varied human life may appear to be, it consists in the performance of specific activities. Therefore, education should prepare a student for life, i.e., preparing definitely and adequately for such activities. Though they may be numerous and diverse they can be discovered for any social class. This requires one to go out into the world of affairs and discover the particulars of which his/her affairs consist. And as such the abilities, attitudes, habits, appreciations and forms of knowledge that men need will be shown. These have to be the objectives of the curriculum, thus making it (curriculum) a series of experiences which children and youth must have by way of obtaining those objectives. 

Curriculum as process.

• Looking at the as a process curriculum is not a physical thing, but rather the interaction of teachers, students and knowledge. In other words, curriculum is what actually happens in the classroom and what people do to prepare and evaluate. 

Curriculum as praxis. 

• Whereas the process model is driven by general principles and places an emphasis on judgment and meaning making, it does not make explicit statements about the interests it serves. The praxis model of curriculum theory and practice on the other hand brings these to the centre of the process and makes an explicit commitment to emancipation. Thus action is not simply informed, it is also committed. That is, the curriculum is not simply a set of plans to be implemented, but rather is constituted through an active process in which planning, acting and evaluating are all reciprocally related and integrated into the process 
• Therefore, curriculum should in due course produce students who would be able to deal efficiently with the contemporary world. It should not be presented as finished concept, but should include the child’s preconceptions and should incorporate how the child views his/her own world. This perspective uses four instincts, to describe how to characterize children’s behavior. They consist of social, constructive, expressive, and artistic. Curriculum should then build an orderly sense of the world where the child lives. As a curriculum designer I have to use livelihoods to connect diminutive account of fundamental activities of life classroom activities. This could be accomplished by combining subject areas and resources. It means I have to make connections between subject matter and the child’s life.