CURRICULUM DESIGN

Curriculum Design



Curriculum Design

Introduction

A curriculum is a series of activities in which students engage with subject matter. Because everything cannot be studied at once, these activities must be orchestrated in some way. This arrangement is called curriculum design. Whether the subject is geometry, visual arts, or map skills, it is arranged in ways that emphasize some aspects and implications of the subject and neglect others. In this way, curriculum design is among the most powerful tools educators can use to influence what students learn.

Curriculum design can be viewed as an arrangement of materials prepared in advance and intended for instruction. Alternately, it can be considered as what emerges from interactions among teachers, students, and materials. In either case, however, a given design suggests conscious planning and brings with it a predisposition to what subject matter and instructional arrangements count as educationally significant (Noddings, 2006).

School Subject Designs

The school-subject approach has a long lineage. Its familiarity, however, can mask shifts in what counts as a subject or an academic discipline as well as its boundaries with other subjects. By the 1890s, for instance, progressive thinkers were referring to the old education giving way to the new. The latter both brought in new subjects and redefined old ones. For example, living languages such as French and German were introduced alongside Latin and ancient Greek, much of what had been considered geography in the 19th century was annexed by history, and the sciences of physics and chemistry, with laboratory methods extolled, entered the curriculum. Such modern methods for the enactment of curriculum, indeed, went hand in hand with modernization of the content of the curriculum (Noddings, 2005).

Dewey's Design

Three years after the after the committee, Dewey founded what came to be called the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago. He experimented with curriculum for ...