Curriculum and the Teacher

35 years of the Cambridge Journal of Education

Nigel Norris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138866430
• eBook ISBN: 9781134050154
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Even though the curriculum can be tightly specified and controlled by strong accountability mechanisms, it is teachers who decisively shape the educational experiences of children and young people at school.

Bringing together seminal papers from the Cambridge Journal of Education around the theme of curriculum and the teacher, this book explores the changing conceptions of curriculum and teaching and the changing role of the teacher in curriculum development and delivery.

The book is organised around three major themes:

• Taking its lead from Lawrence Stenhouse, Part One looks at 'defining the curriculum problem' from a variety of perspectives and includes papers from some of the most influential curriculum theorists over the last thirty years.
• Part Two explores the framing of new orders of educational experience. It has papers from leading educational thinkers who have contributed to debates about how to make education more inclusive, humane, liberating, creative and educational.
• Part Three is focused on teachers and teaching. It offers a selection of papers from significant scholars in the field reflecting on the experience of teaching and how it is personally as well as socially constructed and theorised.

The papers are drawn from important and eventful periods of educational history spanning the curriculum reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the present age of surveillance, accountability and control. A specially written Introduction contextualises the papers.

Part of the Routledge Education Heritage series, Curriculum and the Teacher presents landmark texts from the Cambridge Journal of Education, offering a wealth of material for students and researchers in education.

Part I

Defining the curriculum problem

1 Defining the curriculum problem

Lawrence Stenhouse^*†

On my desk before me is a book of 350 pages. It is called Mønsterplan for Grunnskolen.¹ I bought it in a bookshop in Oslo. It is the curriculum of the Norwegian comprehensive school. Beside it is an Open University coursebook, Thinking about the Curriculum. On page 91 I read:

What we shall do here is to offer a definition which can serve temporarily both as a starting point for our discussion and as a comfort for those who like to have precise statements as a guideline for their thinking. However, as you will find, we qualify this definition constantly as we develop our ideas in the units that follow. It is no “catch-all” definition by any means, and should never be regarded as such. Here it is:

A curriculum is the offering of socially valued knowledge, skills and attitudes made available to students through a variety of arrangements during the time they are at school, college or university.²

Is the mønsterplan a curriculum? Or is the curriculum what happens in Norwegian schools?

If the latter, I shall never know it. I cannot get five years’ leave of absence to attempt to describe all the diverse things that happen in Norwegian schools. And five years is not enough.

I asked a Norwegian curriculum research worker if the mønsterplan was followed in the schools. He said that it was widely followed, but that many older teachers resisted it and did not follow it, particularly in methods. There was, however, little reformist departure from it. Only tradition seemed strong enough to resist it. Tradition in a sense kept alive the old curriculum of the unreformed school.

How far does the curriculum tie the teacher down? (I asked). If I observe him in the classroom, how much of what I see is determined by the mønsterplan?

I was told that the teacher always had the mønsterplan in mind, but that it left him a fair degree of individual freedom. It defined a minimum coverage of subject matter and the outline of a method.

It sounded like a child’s colouring book, I thought.

I find the definitions of curriculum I have come across unsatisfactory, because the problems of curriculum I have encountered in practice as a curriculum research worker slip through them. Perhaps, then, it would be better to attempt to define “the curriculum problem”.

The curriculum problem most simply and directly stated is that of relating ideas to realities, the curriculum in the mind or on paper to the curriculum in the classroom.

The curriculum problem lies in the relationship of the mønsterplan to the practice of the Norwegian school.

Notionally the essence of curriculum might be located in the relation of my own ideas as a teacher to the reality of my classroom: “the true blueprint is in the minds and hearts of the teachers”.³ But the plural here is important. Except for empirical micro-studies of the classroom, the private curriculum of the individual teacher is not of central interest. What is of practical importance in curriculum work is the public curriculum or curricula, that is, curricula that can be held to be in some sense and to some extent publicly accessible to “the minds and hearts” of many teachers.

Thus, a curriculum may be said to be an attempt to define the common ground shared by those teachers who follow it. Although it may sometimes be useful to think of it as the offering to pupils, we must always bear in mind that any similarity between the offering in one classroom and another, in one school and another, must begin in the like-mindedness of teachers.

Most commonly this like-mindedness is a matter of tradition. Induction into the profession includes induction into the curriculum. The formulation of the curriculum tradition may be partly a matter of paper syllabuses, even government reports or Handbooks of Suggestions to Teachers, but it is largely an oral process. And it is often largely oblique, the indirect communication of assumptions and premises through discourse which rests on them rather than states them.

This curriculum tradition is potent. Some mastery of it is required of the new teacher before he be accepted as a “professional”; so the teacher learns to define himself by it. In so far as it is not formally stated, analysed and defended, the traditional curriculum is not easily subjected to criticism. In so far as it is institutionalised in the school system, the school, textbooks and the classroom, the traditional curriculum, however critical I may be of it, is not easy to escape. And as the observation of my Norwegian acquaintance suggests, the traditional curriculum is a force strong enough to resist all the pressures of a centralised educational system where, as is the case in Norway, policies are based on a remarkable degree of social consensus.

Philosophers are likely to be impatient of the traditional curriculum because it is so badly formulated, and its position is so strong that its adherents can afford to neglect justification of their position. Social reformers who, unable to create a new society through political action, hope to do so through the schools are also impatient of the traditional curriculum. It holds the old order in place.

But it is not necessary to question the school either philosophically or socially to want to change the curriculum. Even in its own terms the traditional curriculum is unsuccessful. The greater part of any population is not in the traditional sense either educated or accomplished.

This is not because teachers and educational administrators are uncommonly stupid or lazy or inefficient. It is just that schools are, like factories or shops or football teams, ordinary and imperfect human institutions. We sometimes appear to forget that this much will always be inevitable. Perhaps the school’s commitment to educational ideals and high principles fosters optimism.

Curriculum change is necessary and, if it is of real significance, difficult. It is bound to be partial and piecemeal even in centralised systems where educational edicts by no means always command those to whom they are addressed. It always has to fight the comfort of tradition. “Habits are comfortable, easy and anxiety-free”.⁴ For a teacher, taking up a new curriculum is as difficult as going on to a rigorous diet.

In short, it is difficult to relate new ideas to realities.

The problem is to produce a specification to which teachers can work in the classroom, and thus to provide the basis for a new tradition. That specification needs to catch the implication of ideas for practice.

A curriculum is a specification which can be worked to in practice.

A new curriculum will never be secure until it accumulates around it a tradition. The strain of a uniformly self-conscious and thoughtful approach to curriculum is in the long run intolerable. No doubt self-critical analysis is always desirable, but not analysis of everything. New curricula, too, however much the idealist may regret it, must develop comfortable, easy and anxiety-free habits – though not be captured by them.

A new curriculum expresses ideas in terms of practice and disciplines practice by ideas. It is, I would maintain, the best way of dealing in educational ideas. In curriculum the educationist’s feet are kept on the earth by the continual need to submit his proposals to the critical scrutiny of teachers working with them in practice. And because they are related to practice, ideas become the possession of the teacher.

The ideas of a curriculum must be understood, and understood in their relation to practice. The practice of a curriculum must be subject to review in the light of understanding of ideas, but much of it must be learnable as skills and habits. All action cannot be reflective and deliberate.

If curriculum change depends on the writing of specifications of ideas in terms of practice, how are we to do this? There appear to be some working in the curriculum field who believe we can do this by taking thought. I believe that we can only do so by observing classrooms. If a curriculum specification is to inform practice, it must be founded on practice.

The central problem of curriculum is in curriculum change and consists in the task of relating ideas to practice by producing – in whatever form – a specification which shall express an idea or set of ideas in terms of practice with sufficient detail and complexity for the ideas to be submitted to the criticism of practice and modified by practice with due regard to coherence and consistency as well as piecemeal “effectiveness”.

Such specifications can only be written from the study of classrooms.

It follows that a new curriculum must be implemented in practice before it is defined. A group of people, usually including curriculum workers and teachers, must work together and in dialogue on defined problems and tasks until they begin to develop a new tradition which is a response to those problems and tasks. This tradition must then be translated into a specification which transmits the experience captured by the experimental teachers to their colleagues at large.

Exploration must precede survey, survey must precede charting.

This is the basic justification for curriculum experiment.

Notes and references

* Lawrence Stenhouse is Director of the Centre for Applied Research in Education, University of East Anglia.

† Originally published in: Cambridge Journal of Education 5: 2, 104–108.

1 Mønsterplan for Grunnskolen. Midlertidig utgave. Oslo: Aschehoug, 1971.

2 Bell, Robert, Thinking about the Curriculum. “The Curriculum: Context, Design and Development. Unit 1.” Bletchley: The Open University Press, 1971.

3 Spears, Harold, The High School for Today. New York: American Book Company, 1950, p. 27 quoted in Short, Edmund C and Marconnit, George D., Contemporary Thought on Public School Curriculum. Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown, 1968.

4 Rubin, Louis, A Study of Teacher Retraining. Santa Barbara: University of California, Centre for Co-ordinated Education quoted in MacDonald, B. and Rudduck, Jean, “Curriculum Research and development projects: barriers to success”. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 41, 2, June 1971, pp. 148–154.

2 Bloom’s taxonomy

A philosophical critique (1)

Hugh Sockett^*†

The Curriculum Reform Movement in this country has not so far developed any distinctive theoretical foundations in what American scholars call the field of Curriculum. No doubt historians of Education will be able to provide a coherent explanation of this, not unrelated perhaps to the fact that the prime mover in English Curriculum Re...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction Curriculum and the teacher
• Part I Defining the curriculum problem
• 1 Defining the curriculum problem
• 2 Bloom's taxonomy A philosophical critique (1)
• 3 Bloom's taxonomy A philosophical critique (2)
• 3 Re-thinking evaluation Notes from the Cambridge Conference
• 5 Curriculum criticism Misconceived theory, ill-advised practice
• 6 Authenticity, autonomy and compulsory curriculum
• 7 Authenticity, autonomy and compulsory curriculum A reply to Michael Bonnett
• 8 The idea of a pastoral curriculum
• 9 Curriculum reform and curriculum theory A case of historical amnesia
• Part II New orders of experience
• 10 Teaching through small group discussion Formality, rules, and authority
• 11 The concept of the neutral teacher
• 12 Rationality, democracy and the neutral teacher
• 13 The social organisation of the classroom and the philosophy of mixed ability teaching
• 14 Anti-racism and the ‘new' South African educational order
• 15 Inclusive practice in English secondary schools Lessons learned
• 16 The ecologisation of schools and its implications for educational policy
• 17 Seeing our way into learning
• 18 Pupil participation and pupil perspective ‘Carving a new order of experience'
• 19 Identifying and responding to needs in education
• 20 A curriculum for the future
• Part III Teachers and teaching
• 21 Review essays ‘The Pain Must Go On' and ‘The Highs and Lows of Teaching: 60 years of Research Revisited’
• 22 Teaching and the self
• 23 The emotional contours and career trajectories of (disappointed) reform enthusiasts
• 24 Voice The search for a feminist rhetoric for educational studies
• 25 Reflective writing and the spirit of inquiry
• 26 Narrative, experience and the study of curriculum
• 27 Alienation within the profession – special needs or watered down teachers? Insights into the tension between the ideal and the real through action research
• 28 Educational theory and the professional learning of teachers An overview
• 29 Still no pedagogy? Principle, pragmatism and compliance in primary education
• Index