Curriculum and Imagination

Process Theory, Pedagogy and Action Research

James McKernan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134124701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Curriculum and Imagination describes an alternative 'process' model for designing developing, implementing and evaluating curriculum, suggesting that curriculum may be designed by specifying an educational process which contains key principles of procedure.

This comprehensive and authoritative book:

• offers a practical and theoretical plan for curriculum-making without objectives
• shows that a curriculum can be best planned and developed at school level by teachers adopting an action research role
• complements the spirit and reality of much of the teaching profession today, embracing the fact that there is a degree of intuition and critical judgement in the work of educators
• presents empirical evidence on teachers' human values.

Curriculum and Imagination provides a rational and logical alternative for all educators who plan curriculum but do not wish to be held captive by a mechanistic 'ends-means' notion of educational planning. Anyone studying or teaching curriculum studies, or involved in education or educational planning, will find this important new book fascinating reading.

Part I
Curriculum

The theoretic domain

Chapter 1

The curriculum and its ideological conceptions

Definitions of the word curriculum do not solve curricular problems; but they do suggest perspectives from which to view them.

Lawrence Stenhouse (1975: 1)

The problem of curriculum, and curriculum design in the main, is not the specification of objectives as targets to be attained by students; and then designing a course of study for achieving those objectives. A curriculum, to be truly educational, will lead the student to unanticipated, rather than predicted, outcomes. The problem of curriculum is rather a matter of experiencing a course of human action created through images and understanding related to the things that truly matter in life. Too many of the things that students experience in the school curriculum do not matter in the living of one’s life. It is essentially the development of the powers of understanding in relation to the things that ultimately do count in life that is the real concern for educators and curriculum. A curriculum embodies the planning and implementation of educational experiences through carefully orchestrated procedures made from a judicious selection from the culture. To put it simply, education is not so much about arriving, as in hitting targets, as it is about traveling with passion, and being interested in worthwhile experiences at hand.

The problems of living are not technical concerns of taking a means to an end. They are largely moral, cultural and value-laden. One must choose wisely courses of action that are in harmony and consistent with a unified view of living that has purpose. Learning to choose, and value the “action turn,” is central to learners, and teachers, who must develop situational understanding to be men and women of practical reason (McKernan, 2006). The curriculum must, if successful, ignite the human imagination. This idea of a curriculum as a unique and manifest mandate was ably put by Macdonald:

Curriculum theory is what speaks to us “through it” and what we do is informed by theory; but neither the specific words of theory nor the specific pedagogical acts of educators are the reality of education. What defines each is the spirit and vision that shines through the surface manifestations.

(Macdonald, 1982: 56)

This is a book about designing curriculum in the absence of objectives. The underpinning idea is to develop a curriculum based on a theory of educational experience, rather than behavior change. The central ingredient is experience, rather than behavior. The primary aim of a curriculum is to enable students to think and to make critically informed choices. William Schubert claims the role of curriculum work is a moral imperative. He put it this way:

An educator is entrusted with the most serious work that confronts humankind: the development of curricula that enable new generations to contribute to the growth of human beings and society. This means that those who have chosen to devote themselves to curriculum must address the most basic questions that exist. What does it mean to live a good life and how can a just society be created?

(Schubert, 1986: 423)

The curriculum is concerned with what is planned, implemented, taught, learned, evaluated and researched in schools at all levels of education. The word curriculum is from the Latin currere, meaning “a course to be run, or the running of the course,” and usually is defined as the course of study at an educational institution. William Pinar (1975) argues that currere, as the Latin infinitive suggests, involves the investigation of the nature of the individual experience of the public: of artifacts, actors, operations, of the educational journey or pilgrimage.

The philosopher Richard S. Peters has argued that education involves the initiation of others into worthwhile activities in a morally acceptable manner (Peters, 1966). A curriculum is the educational policy proposal on offer by a school or college and is composed of the valued knowledge, values, skills and other dispositions that have been intentionally planned. The curriculum supports both training and education. This is a crucial distinction and the curriculum has a place for both. Basketball skills, classroom management techniques or computer processing do not involve development of intellect or mind in any depth and can be organized within an “objectives model” of curriculum as they speak to skills development and fall into a “training” sphere. However, areas that invoke knowledge and understanding, that is induction into forms of knowledge and the development of mind, are the sphere of education as distinct from training. The objectives model of planning is satisfactory for instruction and training but it breaks down in “education,” where a “process-inquiry” model is more appropriate. My point is that we are not concerned solely with a cognitive mind development model in speaking of curriculum. In speaking of education we do better to support a process theory rather than a product theory, that is an objectives model of curriculum design. Curriculum can encompass mathematics, history and art as well as building construction and basketball; but not things such as pornography, methods of burglary or tiddlywinks.

In recent years a rather monopolistic view of curriculum design has emerged following the work of behaviorist planners and rational curriculum developers who have based their approach largely on the notion of behaviorist theory and, more specifically, planning by measurable outcomes. Franklin Bobbitt first introduced this concept of objectives into curriculum planning (Bobbitt, 1918, 1924), and Ralph Tyler (1949) popularized this idea for behavioral objectives with his simple syllabus for a course at the University of Chicago titled Basic Principles for Curriculum and Instruction. It is instructive to note in all fairness that Tyler does not merely describe how a curriculum actually occurs but how he thinks it ought to be developed.

This technical perspective is not only a curriculum problem but also a problem for teacher education. Giroux and McLaren boldly submit:

One of the great failures of North American education has been its inability seriously to threaten, or eventually replace, the prevailing paradigm of teacher as formal classroom manager with the more emancipatory model of the teacher as critical theorist.

(Giroux and McLaren, 1986: 286)

There are also political and cultural reasons for the way curriculum is mandated and implemented at present. The neoconservatives have sold policy-makers the notion that what is to count as “official curriculum” is a political strategy exercised to aid such causes as market ideology, personal choice of schooling, standards for literacy, school crime and violence: all decidedly away from the momentous concern for equality of educational opportunity which has been a hallmark of the political landscape, at least in the USA, in education, since the 1954 Supreme Court Case in Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas. In fact there is evidence that re-segregation is now occurring at a growing rate.

Since the 1980s the call has come from the New Political Right in both the USA and the United Kingdom for accountability and a “back to basics,” or essentialist theory; a notion of teaching and testing of pupils, alongside appraisal of teachers’ performances and competencies in subject matter. An allied theme has been that of cultural patriotism and heritage restoration. This has all been achieved by taking power away from teachers and professors and giving it to special interest groups and government.

In the USA curriculum policy and educational provision are duties of the local state. There is no mention of education in the US Constitution. All matters not mentioned are given back to the individual states. Yet states are still subject to Federal Laws, to wit Title X of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act No Child Left Behind (2001). In the United Kingdom, although there are decentralized local education authorities there is a National Curriculum administered by the Department of Education and Science. More control over teachers, increased accountability and performance-based data has been a policy in both the USA and in the United Kingdom for the past quarter century.

The conception of curriculum design advanced in this book runs contrary to that of the technical rationalists’ view. The process-inquiry model abandons the idea of education as the pursuit of specific instructional objectives and the concomitant ends-means production baggage in favor of education as a process and the assertion that the curriculum is really about being faithful to certain key principles of procedure in the conduct of education. The problem for curriculum today is that it is planned in an anti-educational and undemocratic way more often than not by government; and it leaves no discourse at the development and improvement level for those working at the grass roots level. We need, in brief, a political decision to allow for school-based curriculum reform and improvement to re-occur.

To my mind, the curriculum needs to be seen as a continuous educational experience: a process, rather than a product. That is, as an educative experience, rather than a behavior, or outcome of that experience. To this day the work of Lawrence Stenhouse, sketched in his An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development, remains the clearest account of a Process Model put forward as a valuable alternative to the objectives model for curriculum design.

One consequence of the growth in the study of curriculum has been an increasing rhetoric of teacher professional development. Many key decisionmakers call for the acknowledgment that the teacher, as a professional, at whatever level of the education system, has a role to play in curriculum decisions, inquiry and improvement. This fact is often overlooked in the USA and the United Kingdom, where the teacher does not figure in the actual planning and development of new curriculum, but rather only in the implementation stage. In fact, curriculum itself has largely been separated from instruction and assessment. This separation counts as an unhealthy and unprofessional division of labor. Teacher professional development, or empowerment, has been a recent goal for teacher education: “No curriculum development without teacher professional development” was the old adage. However, Michael Apple (1995) argues that teachers have been largely disempowered and raises the interesting question: “Is there a curriculum voice to reclaim?” Indeed, Apple argues that scholars have almost no impact on the field of public curriculum today, nor have they had any influence in the past number of decades in the USA (Apple 1995: 38).

Stenhouse viewed curriculum work as a creative entity:

A curriculum is more like a musician’s folio than an engineer’s blueprint.

It requires an element of aesthetic quality, as well as imagination. Stenhouse continues:

A curriculum, like a recipe for a dish, is first imagined as a possibility, then the subject of an experiment.

(1975: 4)

It is, essentially, an educational proposal, that invites classroom testing. This is also the link that makes the relationship between teaching and research clear. In order to test his or her curriculum practice, the teacher must adopt a research stance.

Like the concept of education, the curriculum is creative, unpredictable in its itinerary and path of growth: moral, intellectual, spiritual and constructive. It is crafted through the exquisite aesthetic virtues of teachers acting upon their own artistic and intuitive situational understanding about what is right and good. It operates best when practical reason is highly honed. Dunne (1997), an Aristotelian educational scholar, argues for practical reasoning and wisdom, noting we need to get back to this “rough ground.” Indeed, this practical self-reflective mode of professional conduct, although well identified by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, has hardly been explored in the curriculum writing of the past century.

In spite of the many reforms, task force reports and the general debate related to education in recent years the theoretical model governing the design and nature of curriculum and assessment has remained virtually unchallenged and unchanged, dominated as it is by an unrelenting mode of theoretical behaviorism and technical rationality that intrudes deep into the national psyche and culture. Yet the possibilities of alternative rational models have been raised. This book charts an existentialist critical context for curriculum thinking.

Culture and curriculum

Every society sets up schools in order to induct students into the culture, that is, the ways of the society. The English philosopher John Locke held that the child’s mind is blank, or tabula rasa, at birth and must begin to acquire the knowledge, habits and values of the group. Thus experience, particularly involving the senses, provides the basis for Locke’s empiricism. The vocal tradition, especially folklore, stories, songs and the like, is more evident than the written word in this process. The curriculum then becomes a reflection of what the people think is valuable, what they do, and what they believe. Curriculum is necessarily a selection from the culture, and it is largely composed of knowledge. Now there is a great deal to select from the culture and this is the tricky task of curriculum developers and policymakers. As one of my graduate students remarked, “The curriculum is like a library to which subjects are constantly being added but few are ever withdrawn.”

There are also difficulties in applying the culture concept to education and curriculum because we live in a multicultural society with pluralist values. That is, American society, just as British society or French society, contains many customs, traditions and values, often incompatible, that are transmitted, learned and shared. In actual practice, most schools emphasize formal bodies of knowledge, arts, skills, languages and moral values in education. This is customary and conventional, and for good reason, as these formal subjects or disciplines of knowledge have come down to us from the ages: in the main from the great medieval universities. This curriculum is known as the Trivium and the Quadrivium, or “The Seven Liberal Arts,” which were present in incipient forms in the schools of Greece, Rome and the Arab world. The Trivium comprised grammar, rhetoric and dialectic (logic); and the Quadrivium was composed of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Philosophy was relegated to advanced study – hence the tradition of the doctorate in philosophy degree.

What we need to appreciate about these seven “subjects” is that they did not approximate closely with what goes by these labels in the modern world. Grammar, for example, was more than the simple content found in grammar courses but also included a fair amount of literature, forms of expression and so forth. In modern times, the Trivium further added history and literature (Smith et al., 1957).

The curriculum of our schools is also a product of politics and interest groups (Giroux, 1994). The theoretical basis of this book is grounded in a belief that educators are more than mere functionaries in a bureaucracy – they are the constructive agents of cultural renewal. Umberto Eco, the Italian art critic and social theorist, and other critical theorists, such as Jurgen Habermas, urge man to adopt a resistance theory towards the encroachment of technological communication (Habermas, 1976). Maxine Greene argues that the technical approach has frozen our imaginations (Greene, 1995: 379). It is an era of conservatism and theoretical frugality.

We observe the “back to basics” movement and the calls for economic accountability with a jaundiced eye. William James, in his celebrated work The Will to Believe, warned:

Philosophers long ago observed the remarkable fact that mere familiarity with things is able to produce a feeling of their rationality. The empiricist school has been so much struck by this circumstance as to have laid it down that the feeling of rationality and the feeling of familiarity are one and the same thing, and that no other kind of rationality than this exists.

(James, 1992: 514)

Thus, half a century after Tyler wrote his classic, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, the objectives model and the use of instructional objectives in both norm-referenced and criterion-referenced testing has assumed an air of infallibility, at least in the USA. It is a major contention of this book that this assumption is problematic and in need of critical re-examination. This author would align with Professor Kliebard:

One wonders whether the long standing insistence by curriculum theorists that the first step in making a curriculum be the specification of objectives has any merit whatsoever. It is even questionable whether stating objectives at all, is a fruitful way to conceive of the process of curriculum planning.

(1975: 80)

Kliebard goes on to assert the James notion of “the sentiment of rationality” in concluding his reappraisal:

One reason for the success of the Tyler rationale is its very rationality. It is an eminently reasonable framework for developing a curriculum. . . . Tyler’s version of the model avoids the patent absurdity of, let us say, Mager’s, by drawing that blueprint in broad outline rather than in minute detail.

In North America, Europe, Australasia and many other parts of the world, the education system is most definitely at risk from the lock-step linear ends-means model of curriculum and assessment. It is at risk from an enemy within its own ranks; that enemy is a dogmatic aspiration to enshrine program-building and evaluation around a limited objectives model and its concomitant assessment technology. The value and quality of an educatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Curriculum: The Theoretic Domain
• Part II Democratic Pedagogy: The Practical
• Part III Teacher Values and Teacher Education
• Part IV Curriculum and Evaluation: The Critical Domain
• References