Curriculum proposals are sets of visionary statements intended to project what some person or group believes schools or school systems should adopt and utilize in formulating their actual curriculum policies and programs. Curriculum proposals are presented when there is a perceived need for change from curriculum that is currently in place. The specific changes stated in a curriculum proposal can be either quite limited or very comprehensive. If a totally restructured curriculum is recommended, particular prescriptions are necessarily based on some overall conception of what curriculum is by definition and what its constituent elements are, and therefore what topics are to be addressed in a curriculum proposal. Attempts have been made to conceptualize curriculum holistically, as an entity clearly distinguished from all other phenomena, but no agreed upon conception has emerged.
To provide a new theoretical and practically useful framework for how curriculum may be conceived, a 10-component conceptualization of curriculum has been stipulated, elucidated, and illustrated for use in designing curriculum policy, programmatic curriculum plans, or formal curriculum proposals. In this conceptualization, curriculum is defined as having the following interrelated components: (a) focal idea and intended purpose(s), (b) unique objective(s), (c) underlying assumptions and value commitments, (d) program organization, (e) substantive features, (f) the character of the student’s educational situation/activity/process, (g) unique approaches/methods for use by the teacher/educator, (h) program evaluation, (i) supportive arrangements, and (j) justifications/rationale for the whole curriculum. Any proposal for total curriculum change should make prescriptions related to all these components.
Discussion of other aspects related to curriculum proposals include how to locate existing curriculum proposals, how to analyze them in relation to this new conceptualization of curriculum, how to choose suitable ones among them for possible adoption, and how to translate a curriculum proposal into actual curriculum policies or plans.
Article
Curriculum Proposals
Edmund C. Short
Article
Outside and Embodied Curriculum: From Integration and Core to Ecological Interdependence
Jason Michael Lukasik
The notion of ecological interdependence, a fundamental concept in the study of ecology and the interrelatedness of living organisms, provides both a metaphorical and literal understanding of how individuals come to understand their place in the world—social, political, and environmental. Given the grim realities of a changing climate, and its inevitable impact on human ways of living, examination of the relationships between humans and the environments in which we live is paramount. Such examinations entail an analysis of the intricate webs of interdependence among organisms. Drawing upon the curricular concepts of integrated and core curriculum, we find a parallel to the dynamic and emergent ways of ecological relationships. Embodied curriculum and outside curriculum provide a foundation for curricular integration, advancing a core curriculum of interdependence. Thus curriculum workers must realize ways in which a core of ecological interdependence enables us to view the world differently, examining human relationships with and within the world. This approach is seen, in part, throughout environmental education programs, from forest schools to informal learning at nature centers. However, a core of ecological interdependence advances a continual examination of the interdependence of living things, and interactions between humans and the nonhuman world, as a central organizing theme in curriculum. Moreover, such an approach eschews the underpinning assumptions of a capitalist democratic state and seeks a conversation among beings and knowledges. A core of ecological interdependence recognizes the importance of ecological relationships for their substantive content as well as for what they teach as an epistemological orientation to curriculum-making.
Article
Ralph Tyler, the Tyler Rationale, and the Idea of Educational Evaluation
Peter Hlebowitsh
Ralph Tyler’s long tenure in the field of curriculum studies began at the schoolhouse door where he first worked as a secondary school educator. Taking an analytical interest in understanding student learning and academic progress, Tyler entered a doctoral program at the University of Chicago in 1926. Because his advisor, Charles Judd, conducted work on the transfer of learning that pointed to the importance of developing general cognitive skills over highly specific ones, Tyler had an early practical handle on how to rethink his ideas on monitoring and documenting academic progress. Tyler recast the idea of pencil-and-paper testing into a broadened construct that could be best described as an evidence collection process, and the idea educational evaluation was born.
Tyler’s unique ideas on evaluation helped him to win an appointment as the Research Director of the Eight-Year Study in 1934, which provided him with a platform for testing his new approach. It also helped him to conceive of a new model for the development of the experimental curricula used in the schools of the Eight-Year Study—a model now famously known as the Tyler rationale. Tyler’s rationale aimed to organize the curriculum around several key functions including: (a) the identification of purposes; (b) the organization of instruction attendant to such purposes; and (c) the design of evaluation mechanisms used to determine whether the stated purposes have been attained. The rationale proved to be enormously popular and eventually emerged as a convention for curriculum development work. Several critics, unhappy with the behavioristic features of the rationale, claimed that the rationale was drawn from a social efficiency tradition that produced school experiences framed and controlled by a large number of atomized objectives. Some years later, criticism of the rationale went to the very heart of the curriculum studies field with assertions that alleged that the rationale had become a conceptual roadblock for the field, embodying a way of thinking about the curriculum that stunted the field’s possibility for vibrant theoretical gains.
Tyler did not engage these criticisms and instead moved forward with a line of administrative and consulting work. In 1948, he was appointed Dean to the Social Science Division at the University of Chicago, and later in 1952, he took on the position of Director of the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. He also became a sought-after advisor on all matters of educational policy and practice, assisting several U.S. presidents on various matters related to educational policy, taking on a large number of international consultancies, and finding his way into the area of test development, working, for instance, with E. F. Lindquist on the first iterations of the General Education Diploma (GED) and serving as the chief architect for the design and development of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Ralph Tyler’s long career generated a remarkable legacy of achievements in education, not the least of which included a model for the development of a school curriculum that carried with it an entirely reimagined way of thinking about student progress. The centrality of his work to the normative dimensions of the school experience and the wide utility of his curriculum model helped to shape the conduct of the school in a progressive direction.
Article
The Curricular Insights of Ivan Illich
Dana L. Stuchul and Madhu Suri Prakash
Ivan Illich’s curriculum vitae provides the frame through which to elaborate three insights—neither curricular, ideologic, utopian, nor messianic, yet penetrating contemporary givens: the institutionalization of values, the “ritualization of progress,” and the perversion of persons under the regime of scarcity. The former priest—whose challenges to the Church as it extended to similar corporate entities of the State rendered him a pariah—was arguably least understood at the moment he was most known. Yet, reviewing the entirety of his corpus, the judgment of Agamben resonates: “Now is the hour of Illich’s legibility.” This “legibility” reveals Illich’s project: his commitment to the struggle for both justice and freedom in the form of cultural, technological, and institutional inversion. His three insights—interculturality, the hidden curriculum of schooling, and a politics of limits—sought to contribute to a redirection of societies away from ecological, cultural, and social demise. His contributions address the following questions: What are the limits—ecological, technological, economic, political—within which pluralistic societies can exist? What do a society’s chosen “tools” say about what it means to be human? What are the terms—justice and freedom—within which the contemporary crises of global pandemic, of climate collapse, and of widespread immiseration and dispossession can be addressed?
Article
Indigenous Storywork as a Basis for Curricula That Educate the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit
Jo-ann Archibald – Q’um Q’um Xiiem
Indigenous storywork is a multifaceted framework of seven principles for working with Indigenous traditional-cultural and life-experience stories for educational, curricular, and research purposes. The principles include respect, responsibility, reverence, reciprocity, holism, interrelatedness, and synergy. These Indigenous storywork principles were developed through research with Indigenous Elders, storytellers, and cultural knowledge holders who were mainly, but not exclusively, from British Columbia, Canada. The principles of respect, responsibility, reverence, and reciprocity prepare educators, curriculum developers, and students to understand the epistemological aspects of Indigenous stories such as their nature and purposes. Developing cultural contextual considerations that influence the respectful representation and telling of stories; enacting ethical responsibilities for the stories, storytellers, and story listeners-learners; creating reverential teaching and learning spaces for Indigenous stories; and developing reciprocal relations that sustain Indigenous stories are examples of preparatory education for Indigenous storywork. The principles of holism, interrelatedness, and synergy facilitate pedagogical processes of working with Indigenous stories to create and spark meaning-making with the stories.
The circle of Indigenous storyworkers has expanded from Canada to the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These storyworkers share how aspects of Indigenous storywork are used for curriculum purposes in kindergarten to grade 12 school subjects, such as math, science, and literacy, as well as in university programs, such as teacher education. Decolonizing and Indigenizing approaches is an integral part of the preparation of future Indigenous storyworkers. A critical examination and understanding of the colonial impact of laws, policies, and education on Indigenous peoples, their Indigenous knowledge systems, and Indigenous stories is needed to move to Indigenizing approaches where the Indigenous community members, Elders, youth, educators, and allies work cooperatively for curricular purposes. Indigenous storywork is a means for these approaches. Together Indigenous storywork principles form a basis or foundation for curricula that educates the heart, mind, body, and spirit.
Article
Literature and the Arts as a Basis for Curriculum in the Work of Maxine Greene
Janet L. Miller
Maxine Greene, internationally renowned educator, never regarded her work as situated within the field of curriculum studies per se. Rather, she consistently spoke of herself as an existential phenomenological philosopher of education working across multidisciplinary perspectives. Simultaneously, however, Greene persistently and passionately argued for all conceptions and enactments of curriculum as necessarily engaging with literature and the arts. She regarded these as vital in addressing the complexities of “curriculum” conceptualized as lived experience. Specifically, Greene regarded the arts and imaginative literature as able to enliven curriculum as lived experience, as aspects of persons’ expansive and inclusive learnings. Such learnings, for Greene, included the taking of necessary actions toward the creating of just and humane living and learning contexts for all. In particular, Greene supported her contentions via her theorizing of “social imagination” and its accompanying requisite, “wide-awakeness.”
Specifically, Greene refused curriculum conceived as totally “external” to persons who daily attempt to make sense of their life worlds. In rejecting any notion of curriculum as predetermined, decontextualized subject-matter content that could be simply and easily delivered by teachers and ingested by students, she consistently threaded examples from imaginative literature as well as from all manner of the visual and performing arts throughout her voluminous scholarship. She did so in support of her pleas for versions of curriculum that involve conscious acts of choosing to work in order not only to grasp “what is,” but also to envision persons, situations, and contexts as if they could be otherwise. Greene thus unfailingly contended that literature and the arts offer multiplicities of perspectives and contexts that could invite and even move individuals to engage in these active interpretations and constructions of meanings. Greene firmly believed that these interpretations and constructions not only involve persons’ lived experiences, but also can serve to prompt questions and the taking of actions to rectify contexts, circumstances, and conditions of those whose lived lives are constrained, muted, debased, or refused.
In support of such contentions, Greene pointed out that persons’ necessarily dynamic engagements with interpreting works of art involved constant questionings. Such interrogations, she argued, could enable breaking with habitual assumptions and biases that dull willingness to imagine differently, to look at the world and its deleterious circumstances as able to be enacted otherwise. Greene’s ultimate rationale for such commitments hinged on her conviction that literature and the arts can serve to not only represent what “is” but also what “might be.” As such, then, literature and the arts as lived experiences of curriculum, writ large, too can impel desires to take action to repair myriad insufficiencies and injustices that saturate too many persons’ daily lives. To augment those chosen positionings, Greene drew extensively from both her personal and academic background and interests in philosophy, history, the arts, literature, and literary criticism.
Indeed, Greene’s overarching challenge to educators, throughout her prolonged and eminent career, was to think of curriculum as requiring that persons “do philosophy,” to think philosophically about what they are doing. Greene’s challenges to “do philosophy” in ways that acknowledge contingencies, complexities, and differences—especially as these multiplicities are proliferated via sustained participation with myriad versions of literature and the arts—have influenced generations of educators, students, teaching artists, curriculum theorists, teacher educators, and artists around the world.
Article
Peace and Curriculum Studies
Molly Quinn
To contemplate the question or concern of peace in curriculum studies, and as has been taken up in the field, is to traverse terrain neither simple nor singular. Peace as a concept, and an ideal, is itself complex and contested, elusory even, and approached in manifold ways, often in relation to other equally intricate and disputed ideas, like violence, war, justice, freedom, hope, and love (as well as human rights, hospitality, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism)—historically informed and context-specific as well. The challenges, too, in undertaking such a task are further compounded as concerning curriculum studies, where there is neither a clearly established nor a cohesive body of work upon which to turn or draw here, where no formalized attention has been given systematically to the study of peace, peace education, or peace studies in relation to such. Nevertheless, one could argue that the field of curriculum from its inception, and enduringly so, has been implicitly and integrally connected to the interest of peace and point to a diversity of work therein, of some breadth and depth, to support this claim and examine this interest. The contemporary scholarship that has emerged in the field and explicitly addressed matters of peace and nonviolence, as well as the work of peace advocates and educators, portends further advancement of this line of inquiry—particularly in response to the growing threats and realities of inequality, conflict, violence, war, ecological devastation, and genocide worldwide—in the hopes of creating a more beautiful world of justice, harmony, and human flourishing via education.
Article
Tradition and Transformation in Danish Early Childhood Education and Care
Karen Ida Dannesboe and Bjørg Kjær
Denmark has a long tradition of public provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) as part of what is known internationally as the Nordic welfare model. Both traditions and transformations within Danish ECEC are parallel to the establishment and development of this model. The emergence of child-centered pedagogy, so characteristic for Danish ECEC, is part of specific historical processes. Since the 1960s, the ECEC sector has undergone significant expansion and in 2020, most children in Denmark between the ages of 1 and 6 attend an ECEC institution. This expansion has positioned ECEC as a core universal welfare service, including a special focus on preventing injustice and inequality and on taking care of the vulnerable and disadvantaged. Early 21st-century international discourses on learning and early intervention have influenced political reforms and initiatives addressing ECEC institutions and the work of “pedagogues” (the Danish term for ECEC practitioners with a bachelor’s degree in social pedagogy). Since the 1990s, there has been growing political interest in regulating the content of ECEC, resulting in various policies and reforms that have changed the nature of Danish ECEC by introducing new learning agendas. This has been accompanied by an increased focus on the importance of the early years of childhood for outcomes later in life and on the role of parents in this regard. These tendencies are embedded in political initiatives and discourses and shape the conditions for ECEC, perceptions of children and childhood, the legitimacy of the pedagogical profession, the meaning of and emphasis on young children’s learning, the importance of inclusion, and the changing role of parents. These changes in social reforms and pedagogical initiatives interact with national historical processes and international tendencies and agendas at different levels.
Article
Reforms of Education in Nordic Countries
Jens Rasmussen
Educational reforms have become the normal condition of education, and educational reforms will come ever more frequently due to rapid and accelerated changes to the world in which we live. Reforms are always concerned with anticipating the future due to the belief that education can be done better in and for the future. When pedagogy orients itself towards the future, demand for a solid basis for its decisions becomes pressing. Therefore, trend analysis has become an industry that seeks to establish an (you might say) uncertain certainty about an uncertain future as a basis for reforms in and of the educational system. In its orientation towards the future, education seems to be in a process of transformation into new combinations of tradition in the sense of normative, philosophical considerations and evidence for what works in education and for ensuring that students can achieve their best, which is the purpose of teaching and education.
Article
Foreign Language Education in Japan
Ryuko Kubota
Historically, foreign language education in Japan has been influenced by local and global conditions. Of the two major purposes of learning a language—to gain new knowledge from overseas and to develop practical communication skills—the latter pragmatic orientation became dominant toward the end the 19th century, when access to foreign language learning increased and English became a dominant language to learn. The trend of learning English as an international language for pragmatic purposes has been further strengthened since the 1980s under the discourses of internationalization and neoliberal globalization. An overview of the current status of foreign language education reveals that there are both formal and non-formal learning opportunities for people of all ages; English predominates as a target language although fewer opportunities to learn other languages exist; English is taught at primary and secondary schools and universities with an emphasis on acquiring communicative skills, although the exam-oriented instructional practices contradict the official goal; and adults learn foreign languages, mainly English, for various reasons, including career advancement and hobbyist enjoyment. Such observations include contestations and contradictions. For instance, there have been debates on whether the major aim of learning English should be pragmatic or intellectual. These debates have taken place against the backdrop of the fact that the learning of a foreign language—de facto English—is much more prevalent in society in the early 21st century compared with previous periods in history, when access to learning opportunities was limited to elites. Another contradiction is between the multilingual reality in local and global communities and the exclusive emphasis on teaching English. This gap can be critically analyzed through a critical realist lens, through which multilayers of ideology in discourses and realities in the material world are examined. The predominance of English is driven by a neoliberal ideology that conceptualizes English as a global language with economic benefit, while testing and shadow education enterprises perpetuate the emphasis on English language teaching. The political economy of foreign language education also explains the longstanding socioeconomic disparity in English ability.
