ON THE LEFT END

On the spectrum of potential approaches to curriculum, farthest from the technical end of the continuum lies the reconceptualist approach.  It is so far down that conceptual road that some curricular scholars don’t consider it an approach at all.  But for our purposes, it is.  Other scholars, according to Ornstein and Hunkins,[1] view it as an extension of the humanistic approach.  The reason some curricular experts dismiss this approach lies mostly in the fact that it does not address curricular development issues; it’s solely into content.  The curricular workers who adopt it shy away from technical matters associated with development.  Initially, then, this approach engenders some controversy.

The argument that holds it to be an approach has been based on the claim that it addresses the social, economic, and political aspects of education – not just curriculum – and its focus is not limited to schools, but all of society.  As such, its advocates emulate those who follow the academic approach in that they concentrate their subject on the abstract and shun the more practical side of curricular work.  This steers their attention away from curricular development, per se.  The effect for those who toil in the fields of education, away from the halls of academia, is that they are prone to see such study as impractical.  Their challenges are to design, maintain, and evaluate curricular components at actual school sites, not to ponder the social conditions of the day.  But to those who do deal in theory, the contributions of the reconceptualists are much appreciated, especially among other reconceptualists.  Hence, there is a divide in the education world between practitioners and theorists – a divide, I might add, not limited to the affairs of education.

But reconceptualists do have their supporters among the practicing minions.  They tend to take a postmodern perspective when going about their jobs.  They argue that curricular work demands a new consciousness.  To them, there is no one way to view curriculum development and they, along with their fellow practitioners, need to embrace a more open and interactive perspective.  They tend to emphasize that development should be the product of communal efforts, not limited to the work of specialists.  And here we encounter our initial aim in this review of approaches; that is, curriculum work should be transformed from what it generally tends to be.  Those other approaches, reviewed over the last five postings, are to varying degrees more technical.  Instead of striving for well-managed processes in which the authorized specialists run through their preconceived processes and logical sequential steps – a favorite target here is Tyler’s model of curriculum development previously described under my treatment of the behavioral approach – curriculum workers should not only allow, but also encourage chaos.  More specifically, they should invite all the stakeholders – students, parents, teachers, administrators, other members of the community, academia, etc. – into the process and let them thrash out a strategic plan for a school.  The postmodern eye looks for open systems, not closed ones; it appreciates inclusiveness and representation, not special expertise that always seems to have hidden agendas.  For many, this will seem uncomfortable and reconceptualists would recommend that such discomfort emanates from limited mindsets.  Some might add that these are mindsets springing from interests not necessarily limited to the concerns of educating youth in the most viable, productive way and in the interests of the students and of the community.

And this leads one to that segment of reconceptualist thought that tends toward the political.  For these pedagogues, the aim is emancipation from the norms, conceptualizations, and ruling interests that are in place to protect the powerful, be they in an economic, political, or any other realm of authority, such as the spiritual.  This calls not only for change, but for transformative change.  Oppressive power relations are not just a matter of brute authoritarian controls, but also of subtle sociological and psychological controls.  Those in power control the mechanisms of socialization and with them, the modes of communicating what the powerful deem to be prudent and moral.  To break such control from cases that are overt to cases that are tacit and shrouded, emancipating education has to be transformative; that is, not only changing what is known and believed by students, but what they end up believing should be.  The assumption among reconceptualists is that what exists in our schools mirrors what exists in our society:  a static and oppressive reality.  Want to hear an expression of this view?  Review the rhetoric of the Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for president.  Such a review will give you a sense of what it would be like to feel the “Bern” in terms of running our schools.

Pioneers in this tradition were George S. Counts, Harold O. Rugg, and Harold Benjamin.  They started curricular work that among their followers has been noted for their more emotionally charged arguments.  These arguments have been organized and they compose a fairly discernable ideology – to varying degrees, among its adherents, following the ideas of Karl Marx – and, as such, the ideology attacks inequality and discrimination based on class, gender, race, religion, nationality, age, and sexual preferences.  The adherents target what they see and define as miseducation and oppression.  To their critics, many reconceptualists suffer from myopia in that they oversimplify and overgeneralize oppressive aspects of any society and underappreciate meaningful policies that address them.

In terms of change, there is a lot to derive from the reconceptualists.  Their call for transformational change is welcome.  Along with this type of change, their call for inclusion is seen as supportive of the efforts many change agents exert.  It should be pointed out, though, that not all curricular workers who call for transformational change are reconceptualists.  One can say that reconceptualists are transformational change advocates with an attitude.  This might be overstating the case a bit, but one can detect this strident tendency when one attends their gatherings and listens to their speakers.  Of course, one should not over generalize or dismiss what reconceptualists have to offer due to the belligerence of some (many) of their spokespersons and followers.  In terms of finding reconceptualists in your local school, perhaps you will find one or two of them holding teaching positions, but do not be surprised if you do not find any.

This ends my review of the educational approaches Ornstein and Hunkins offer.  The approaches have been the behavioral, the managerial, the systems, the academic, the humanist, and the reconceptualist approaches.  This one and the last five postings have provided a description of each of them.  The aim is to arm potential change agents with a bit of knowledge as to the potential, curricular biases among educators they might encounter at the school site or the district office.

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[1]  Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

THE ELUSIVE “AUNTIE MAME” FACTOR

In my current review of the various approaches to curriculum,[1] with the last approach, the academic, you might have sensed a shift from the previous three approaches.  That is, the academic, with its philosophic bent, is quite a bit less technical than the three approaches that preceded it:  the behavioral, managerial, and the systems approaches.  With this posting, I will describe an approach that is the most artistic of them all, the humanistic.  As such, this approach can be considered the least rigid and technocratic.  Here, the attempt is one in which there is a much higher level of concern with what is personal and with how the person interacts socially.  The approach is more of a reaction to what its proponents see as curriculum workers neglecting the artistic and cultural elements that a sound curriculum should not only encompass, but upon which it should focus.  By so doing, those involved, from curriculum worker to student, can address the need to be self-reflective and to progress toward self-actualization.  In order to do this, this approach takes into account, to a much more heightened level, the socio-psychological environment of the classroom and of the school in which the curriculum is to function.

As with many of the approaches considered, this one has its origins in the work of John Dewey and his days at the University of Chicago.  There, the works of Charles Judd and Francis Parker are of note.  It gained impetus when Dewey moved to the Teachers College at Columbia University.  Other names associated with this approach at Columbia include Frederick Bosner, Hollis Caswell, L. Thomas Hopkins, William Kilpatrick, and Harold Rugg.  The stretch of time between the development in Chicago to New York stretched from the 1920s to the 1950s.  The later years were influenced by advancements in child psychology and humanistic psychology.  Insights into ego, valuing, mental health, and personal growth and fulfillment were incorporated into the work of these educators.

Probably the area of pedagogy most affected by the developments of these curricular workers was in elementary education.  Such instructional techniques as group games, artistic endeavors, and field trips were devised with the overall aim of having students engage in life simulating activities and activities that reflected socially dynamic aspects of learning such as creative problem solving and active participation within, when possible, school-wide or even community settings.  All of this had a strong dose of progressive thinking behind it.

There was a strong input from developmental psychologists Robert J. Havighurst, Erik Erikson, and Abraham Maslow.  Child-centered instructional innovations by German educator Frederick Foebel, Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Scottish educator A. S. Neill were incorporated.  In addition, what I believe to be a very important development was the attention these educators brought to what was labeled the informal and hidden curriculum – those aspects of schooling that are not identified or necessarily addressed by the other approaches.  To cite a simple example, this approach looks at the effect of having those bells ringing every hour or so to indicate the “learning” period either beginning or ending.  How do such practices define what we consider education to be and, in turn, how artificial is that definition?  As part of this new viewpoint, educators were encouraged to take into account the whole child – emotions as well as cognitive and behavioral factors – in how and why a child is educated.  This added such areas of concern as music, health education, literature, and the other humanities to the content and were considered just as important as the STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and math.

From all of this work, various instructional practices were added to the repertoire of teachers.  These included cooperative learning, small-group learning and other practices that emphasized more of the cooperative rather than the competitive nature of learning.  It also strongly suggested that curriculum planning and implementation take on a more social character where parents and other community representatives could be included.  There should be, according to the proponents, more collegiality and mentoring going on at the schoolhouse and, in turn, participation should be considered a duty by other members of the community.  The addition of curriculum committees would promote a more bottom up view as opposed to the managerial perspective of a top down approach to curriculum development and implementation.  This whole perspective probably hit its apogee during the 1970s.  But it is my impression that while a lot of this is given lip service, with mandatory committees being instituted, the whole approach never took much of a hold as its proponents hoped.  While a faculty of any size would probably have one or two teachers – the creative ones – the bulk of instruction in that school does not follow the humanistic approach.  The missing element is the necessary transformational change such a dynamic and all-encompassing shift demands.  That is, to fully implement these ideas, teachers, administrators, parents, students, and other community members have to have an emotional commitment that is simply not there, at least not to the degree that one would need in order to secure the displacement of what I believe is prominent in our schools – the managerial approach.  Perhaps such a change is unrealistic and utopian, but I do believe our schools can more meaningfully apply what this approach strives to implement.  What seems to be missing is a more realistic view of what change encompasses – hence, the need for more well-informed and skilled change agents.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

THE SANCTITY OF KNOWLEDGE

I am in the midst, over the last three postings, of conveying short descriptions of the various approaches to curricular work.  To date, I have described the behavioral approach, the managerial approach, and the systems approach.  Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins[1] identify three other approaches:  academic, humanistic, and reconceptualist.  This posting will be a quick look at the academic.  I write the word quick because in my overall aim of conveying to you information that would be useful in any attempt you might make in changing a school’s curriculum, this approach will have little influence on change efforts due to the scarcity of teachers or administrators who “practice” this approach.

When I think of the academic approach, I envision a teaching staff all decked out in their caps and gowns behind their respective lecterns.  That is a bit unfair, although I don’t mean anything derogatory by offering that image.  It is just that this approach emphasizes the scholarly.  Here, the teacher’s role is seen as predominately dispensing knowledge.  This knowledge can be encyclopedic or synoptic in character.  The tendency is to be historical or philosophic.  Here, the practical – vocational, for example – is seen as pedestrian or somewhat less than fully important. 

Its heydays were between the 1930s and 1950s.  Little concern among its practitioners – or should I say, its scholars – was given to instructional methods.  Information is dispensed, perhaps discussed, perhaps applied to situations that confront students with dilemmas and conclusions, perhaps, are solicited.  The main concern is to assure that students are presented with the information in understandable forms and that students, indeed, understand it.  The emphasis is more in the preparation of these presentations.  Preparation of such lessons is done in a scholarly fashion and the integrity of the material is maintained and respected.  The material itself is bolstered by a good deal of background information so that the student gets a healthy dose of what is relevant to the topic under study.  A good example is these educators’ treatment of John Dewey.  While educators of other approaches see Dewey as a source of instructional ideas, followers of the academic approach see the innovator as a source of philosophic ideas that should be presented to students as just that, a set of ideas – his work is seen not as a means, but as an end in itself.

After the 1950s, this approach lost favor.  This curricular approach moved on to such concerns as syntax and language, the structure of the discipline, and qualitative studies; that is, they began looking into more epistemological concerns along with their treatment of ontological concerns.  This was a bit of a challenge for undergraduate and beginning graduate students who did not have the background in history and philosophy to handle such material.  But the approach survived in doctoral seminars.  More recent attention among these scholars has shifted to postmodern concerns.  This emphasis looks at questions of how knowledge is constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed.  Again, the effect appeared obtuse to less sophisticated students. 

All of this is a bit beyond our interest here, but perhaps you would like to look into these concerns further.  As for educators influenced by this approach, in all my years of teaching, I worked with only one teacher (and no administrators) whom I considered a practitioner (or scholar) who followed this approach in the pursuit of his trade.  Therefore, as I alluded to above, in terms of dealing with educators, a parent, a teacher, or an administrator will probably not encounter a significant number of followers of the academic approach.

From time to time, there will be a nationally renowned scholar who will argue for more rigor, in the traditional sense, among the curricular academics.  Some names in the history of this approach include Henry Morrison, Boyd Bode, William Schubert, and William Pinar.  One area of scholarly work that is influenced by the academic approach is referred to as the foundations.  This is particularly true of the foundational topics that include the historical, philosophic, social, and political aspects of education in general, and curriculum and schooling more specifically.  Also of note is that as generalists, the adherents of this approach are known to bring into the study and discussion of curriculum such areas of interest as religion, psychotherapy, literary criticism, and linguistics.  They tend to want to be seen as those curriculum specialists who are concerned with the words and ideas of education as opposed to the instructional aspects of education.  A lofty group indeed.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

MORE ENGINEERS THAN CLINICIANS

Now take the curriculum approach I just described in the last posting, the managerial approach, and make it more formal, more organized, more of a give and take between components of the educational organization in question, and you have the next approach to curriculum, the systems approach.[1]  A product of the theoretical work of the 1950s and 60s in the social sciences – the work, let’s say, of Talcott Parsons in sociology, David Eastman in political science, and others – this view emphasizes, at the risk of oversimplifying, the interactions of an organization’s components.  The entailed social action is based on symbolic recognition and manipulation through its mechanisms of communication.  Such social activities strive for equilibrium as the organization deals with the challenges it confronts.  In doing so, it must satisfy certain systemic functions, such as production or maintenance, to some minimum degree, in order to keep on doing its work.  The theory gets quite involved, but for our purposes, let me just point out that this approach is concerned with how the different cells within its structure interact.  The cells of a social system are the individuals who occupy the various roles that make up its structure, both individually and in collectives such as departments.  When one is considering a school district of any size, the cells, their relations, and their relative levels of influence and power tend to be formally defined, although the approach does recognize informal power relations as well.

When applied to curricular issues, therefore, the practitioners who apply this approach engage in using charts and diagrams, flowcharts and organizational charts as they speak of stages of development and implementation of curricular planning (usually sequence is important:  development, design, implementation, and evaluation).  This is focused on the processes by which curriculum is formed instead of any content or scope.  All this is organized by use of systems’ language.  Terms such as subjects, courses, unit plans, and lesson plans have become the terms that that language uses.  As with the behavioral approach, an approach that has had quite an influence on the systems approach, the adoption of systems by businesses has influenced how schools and school districts have gone about their operations.  In addition, its prevalence in the military has also had an effect.  Some would claim that its application has made large organizational arrangements possible by providing the theoretical wherewithal by which to devise the necessary structural and procedural elements a large organization demands.  For example, the contribution of the Rand Corporation and its Planning, Programming, Budgeting Systems (PPBS) have introduced ideas about how to organize and carry out essential processes which large bureaucracies need to perform in order to establish and maintain order.  Levels of organizational complexities have characterized many larger social arrangements and, in the end and to varying degrees, have functioned successfully enough to proceed with their activities.  Therefore, the application of the systems approach is deemed essential for national and transnational corporations to work.

A pioneer in this field who has had a large impact on the question of success and how it is defined, observed, and accounted for, is Ed Deming and his 14 points, known as total quality management (TQM).  This innovation placed great emphasis in regarding clients’ (in the case of school districts, students’) priorities.[2]  Some consider the work of Deming and his contribution as a paradigm shift.    Keep in mind, “customer” satisfaction is easily lost if the entity under consideration, be it a business, an industry, the military, or any government bureaucratic division, is of ample size.  Deming’s work has pointed out that to be “satisfying” to the client, the organization has to be in possession of “profound knowledge.”  That is, knowledge that is based on systemic thinking, theory of variation, theory of knowledge, and knowledge of psychology.

Systemic knowledge is more of a disposition to appreciate how complex the system is.  The system is made up of many cells (actors) engaged in many interacting actions in a dynamic setting(s) in which functions are either satisfied or in the process of attempting to be satisfied.  The theory of variation is acknowledgement that those actors are individuals (or collectives of individuals) with varying motivations, emotions, viewpoints, and the like, which again, adds to the complexity.  In order to function, levels of respect and civility must be maintained.  The theory of knowledge is a recognition that expertise is necessary and that any actor needs to be able to identify it, give it its due, and learn to work with it in a collaborative way.  And knowledge of psychology simply refers to the need for each participant to not underestimate the human needs of each actor, including him/herself.

In terms of schools or school districts, all of these qualities are utilized in the development, design, implementation, and evaluation of curriculum.  The good news is that Mr. Deming’s work brings the systems approach close to what I would consider a federalist view.  If implemented, I would consider the resulting organization an association, one in which the actors would consider themselves in partnership with every other actor within that organization.  In such an arrangement, each entity defines his/her (or their) interest(s) as mutually advanced or obstructed by what happens.  The problem, though, is that the tone of systems’ thinking does not lead to such a view.  Systems’ thinking, I believe, is too compartmentalized to engender the level of collectivism it demands.  By collectivism, I am not referring to socialist arrangements in which individualism is sufficiently disregarded.  Instead, I mean a collectivism in which each individual fully consents to the formation or the joining of the organization in question and is allowed and encouraged to function as Deming proscribes.  And, in addition, the possibility of such an arrangement is, as presently manned and organized, beyond the realm of possibility when it comes to the majority of schools or school districts.  While I believe this, it does not mean schools and districts cannot take steps toward the Deming ideal.  The paradigm shift that needs to take place exists not only in the theoretical field, but also in the hearts and minds of those who fill those systemic cells.

And what’s the likelihood of that happening?  To have it happen, one needs a united view of curriculum; the strategic plan of a school or school district has to have enough of a coordinated plan to be subject to the type of systemic product which Deming assumes.  Let me share a bit of inside information.  On our academic campuses, those who argue for the benefits of a singular academic field of curricular studies make up a small minority.  Most academics who deal with curricular questions see their provinces of concern to be a particular subject area, such as social studies education, and look with disdain upon those who suggest a curricular field of study and research that would cut across subject areas.  Therefore, I don’t see where academics or, for that matter, their “off springs,” the resulting teachers and administrators the academics have trained, adopt the disposition that would view the national educational arrangement as the kind of system in which Deming’s ideas could take hold.  In general, I would further say that systems theory or approach as it is used, is still more of a mechanical view than an organic one, seeing organizations more as machines than as organisms.  Therefore, its use is more of an engineering effort than a clinical one.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

[2] My small editorializing here is that the true clients of a public school system make up the total populous of a given school jurisdiction of which the student is but a part (but that is an issue for another time).

YES, SIR/MADAM

With this posting, I want to pick up on my presentation of the various approaches to curriculum.  I have been basing my reporting on one account of such matters, that of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.[1]  To date, I have described the first of their listed approaches, the behavioral one.  This posting will look at the managerial approach.  This, along with the behavioral approach, is considered as one of three technical/scientific approaches.  Here, we have an approach that emerged from a behavioral view, but does not have that approach’s penchant for particular curricular content – such as the 3Rs.  Instead, this approach places its emphasis on the bureaucratic authority of managers such as principals and curriculum supervisors or specialists, both at the school site and at the district offices.  The idea is that curriculum should be the product mostly of the work of those who have the authority and expertise to make curricular decisions.  It also places a lot of reliance on scientific findings which emanate from those scholars who study curricular issues.  While this reliance is present, followers of this approach do not see themselves as theoreticians, but instead feel comfortable with the role of practitioner.  They are the ones who actually work in schools and with teachers and other staff members.  Yet, in actuality, most of the work this approach produces often comes down from district offices.  By and large, most of the innovations that these folks have developed and initiated come from “downtown.”

Usually, such efforts are noted for their issuance of a plan which is noted for stated, rational principles and a procedural component of logical steps.  Implementation counts on authority.  Unfortunately, funding does not often have sufficient monies to conduct needed training or gather sufficient information that would reveal the level of support such innovations demand.  This, by the way, is my personal observation of such efforts based on my years of working for the Miami-Dade school district, which Wikipedia ranks as the fifth largest in the nation.

This does not mean that the managerial approach does not necessarily seek and solicit input from teachers and other lower ranked employees.  As a matter of fact, since much of their literature produced by those who scholarly produce studies in this vein point out the importance of such input, many of these practitioners do seek such information as they develop their plans.  They are told that they need to take into account cultural factors that will affect their ability to successfully accomplish their plans.  But I must write that they seem to underestimate how important it is to solicit such input in an organic fashion.  They may ask through surveys what underlings feel, but these other staff members are not an integral part in planning and evaluating what is developed.  At least, that was my experience with such efforts.

During the early 1990s, Miami-Dade embarked on a plan – concocted downtown – known ironically enough as School Based Management/Shared Decision-Making.  The essence of this plan was to institute at each school site a governing cadre of teachers to devise particular policy for their school.  There was a lot of hoopla and, despite ample cynicism, the program began with some in-service training and a lot of encouragement.  What was missing was enough definitional clarity:  what were the authoritative boundaries of such cadres?  Each school had the option of participating and each participating school submitted a model of the structure it was going to put in place.  My school did participate and I was heavily involved in both devising my school’s model and then later in providing leadership.  I ended up chairing the main governing committee for two years – voted in each year.  About a third of the way in my second year, I realized that we were not in a position to institute a modest curricular change that had to do with the sequence of our courses.  Why?  Because it would not be in congruence with the other schools of the district, even though the change would have been in sync with the rest of the state.  Oh well.  This shared decision-making can only go so far.  The whole effort lasted four years.  Final verdict: it was a failure, although certain benefits were derived.

Of course, the above example is only a sample size of one; therefore, people cannot make a comprehensive conclusion from such a limited experience.  Perhaps the plan was good and we were not up to the challenge.  My point, though, and it is bolstered by what Ornstein and Hunkins write, the managerial approach tends to shift authority to ever higher levels of authority.  They report that the states’ bureaucracies are taking over ever more levels of control when it comes to innovation and change.  Of course, within our federal system, the state governments are the ultimate sovereigns when it comes to school issues – not even the central government can tell the states what to do as long as the state is not violating constitutionally sanctioned federal law (that includes US Constitutional provisions).  This gives the state a lot of leeway, if it wishes to exercise such power, in determining school policy within its public school systems.  Historically, many such prerogatives have been left to the local districts, but with increased clamor for improvements, there has been political pressure for the state governments to exert more control and this includes issues involving curriculum.  Consequently, this approach to curriculum does not seem to be abating any time soon.  The only change is that more of the decisions – plans – will probably be emanating from state capitals as opposed to local, downtown offices.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

AN ORDERLY APPROACH TO CURRICULUM

If you recall, when I reviewed the four main curricular philosophies, I arranged them from the most conservative to the most liberal or transformative.  That list was perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and reconstructionism.  In this posting, I will begin my review of the approaches to curriculum development.  They tend to be somewhat arranged from conservative to liberal, but they are better thought of as being arranged from the most technical/scientific to the most humanist/artistic.  The approaches I will identify and describe are behavioral, managerial, systems, academic, humanistic, and reconceptualist approaches.  So, let us begin with the behavioral approach.[1]

The origin of this approach starts in the 1920s at the University of Chicago and the person most identified with its initial development is Franklin Bobbitt.  To get a sense of its early appeal, one needs to remember that the prevailing perception among the professional classes of the time was the then inspiring marvels that were being created by the industrial plants around the nation.  Not only were they producing the great mechanical wonders that were beginning to enter even the home by way of labor saving appliances – for example, washers, refrigerators, and automobiles – but they were also being produced with increased efficiency – the assembly line, time and motion studies, etc.  What developed, according to Raymond Callahan, was a “cult of efficiency.”[2]  This movement, if you will, had repercussions throughout the professional world including education.

At the base of this movement was a reliance on science and technology.  In terms of production processes, the ideas of Frederick Taylor became highly influential.  His innovative ideas concerning time and motion, cost cutting, and reliance on quantitative measures revolutionized how things were produced.  The effect on education was pervasive.  The schoolhouse began to be viewed as a production facility, a factory, in which raw materials were brought in and worked on and shipped out as finished products.  In a school, what was the main raw material?  Students.  They arrived relatively ignorant and they left relatively educated – the final product.  The question became:  how cheaply – how efficiently – could that production process be conducted?  Several practices were introduced that are now considered as just the way education is done:  from the bells indicating when production processes began and ended, to specialization according to subject matter and teaching skills, to increased teacher-student ratios, to lower salaries for teachers.  This is just a sampling of these educational innovations that were institutionalized during this period.

While all of this is part of curricular concerns – remember, curriculum is the strategic plan at a school that affects what and how students learn – those aspects of schooling that directly and overtly affected the planning of learning experiences were also changed.  Here, a string of curricular pioneers began a series of innovations; they include the aforementioned Franklin Bobbitt, W. W. Charters, Ralph Tyler, and Hilda Taba.  From the early part of the last century, Bobbitt and Charters introduced into the curricular language such concerns as goals, objectives, and measured outcomes which were to be demonstrated by observable behaviors.  We began to speak of units of instruction – and later modules – which broke down what was to be taught into manageable segments of material.  The language was also more definitive as these learning segments were made up of clear and precise activities that the students performed in order to accomplish desired behaviors, be they answering questions on a test or successfully accomplishing some skilled task.  An early published work by Bobbitt had over 800 objectives accompanied by clearly stated activities designed to accomplish those objectives.  The plans were the “means” by which identified, stated “ends” were to be attained; that is, measurable behaviors.

As you might have guessed, much of this approach is based on behaviorist psychology.  And like the development of behaviorist psychology, it has mellowed in its ideas through the decades.  The thinking within this approach originally saw learning as just one illustrative example of the stimulus-response view that behaviorists such as Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B. F. Skinner advanced.  Today, this view of psychology has changed by incorporating findings of other schools of thought, such as those of the cognitive tradition.  The current field of behavioral economics demonstrates that transition – a field that has much to offer education and change theory.

Through the years, this original orientation of technical proficiency has also softened through the works of Tyler and Taba.  Tyler, in the late 1940s, developed a curricular development model that still has significant influence in the curriculum field.  His model took into account more localized, social factors that affect the learning process.  His three origins of curriculum: the student, the social environment, and the subject matter, and his “screens,” social philosophy and learning theory, took a large step toward humanizing the curriculum development process as conceptualized by the behavioral approach.  Taba’s work was more influential in how educators viewed instructional development.  Both took into account more psychological aspects that are unique to individuals that affect their peculiar learning process, but maintain much of the rigor that this approach introduced to education.  Both still saw learning as a rational development, albeit not so orderly as originally conceived by the earlier proponents of this approach.  While I do not consider myself a behaviorist, I do appreciate the ability of identifying those aspects or factors that one needs to address in curriculum work that is offered by the Tyler model.  And I try to view curriculum as needing to take into account the fact that students are individuals with their own cognitive functions and who lead their lives within varying social contexts.  As such, I agree with Ornstein and Hunkins; the behavioral approach will not only survive, but will also continue to be the one approach by which others will be compared.

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[1] Again, I will base most of the factual accounts of these approaches on the work of Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  See Ornstein, A. C. and Hunkins, F. P.  (2004).  Curriculum:  Foundations, principles, and issues.  Boston, MA:  Allyn and Bacon.

[2] Callahan, R.  (1962).  Education and the cult of efficiency.  Chicago, IL:  University of Chicago Press.

A CONTEXT FOR CURRICULAR APPROACHES

This blog is going to, with this posting, take a bit of a turn.  I am going to place more emphasis on the notion of change.  I have already addressed this general concern quite a bit.  My aim is to share what I know about instituting change at a school site or any organizational setting.  My reason for this shift is that I hope my promotion of federalist theory might motivate some out there to seek a change in their local schools toward this approach in civics education.  Another reason is that what I know about change overlaps, a great deal, with federalist thought.  So by writing about change theory, I am addressing two issues at once.  I have delved into change theory and have posted a significant amount of material.  I even offered a model of what a change agent might encounter in terms of the individuals he or she encounters in a change effort.  This posting will begin to address the target of a relevant change project; that is, this posting will look at curriculum, per se.  After all, my overall aim is to have federalist theory be the construct that guides curriculum developers and curriculum workers – from teachers to national curriculum professionals – in selecting the content for government and civics courses of study at the secondary level.

In my general comments concerning curriculum, let me identify my main source of general curricular information.  There are a number of books that provide introductions to the topic of curriculum and curricular theory.  I will be primarily using Curriculum:  Foundations, Principles, and Issues by Allan C. Ornstein and Francis P. Hunkins.  This introduction is in its seventh edition.  As for my treatment of curriculum, I will not be about making you a curriculum expert.  My more modest endeavor is to share with you those aspects of curriculum that help a parent or some other interested citizen in instituting a change in the curricular offerings at a local school.  I might also include the average teacher as a potential audience for this “instruction.”  Teacher preparation programs do not expend a lot of effort in teaching their students about curricular theory.  The idea is that the average teacher is charged with implementing the existing curriculum, not with questioning or meddling in what the curriculum is, either in its entirety or in part.  As I have pointed out in this blog, for the average teacher, the curriculum consists of taking the provided textbook and “teaching it” from cover to cover.  That teacher does not question or even think to question why the particular textbook was chosen or if the subject matter could be taught in a different way or for different aims and goals.

In this blog, I have already addressed other aspects of curriculum.  I have, for example, distinguished curriculum from instructional plans.  The former is more the strategic aspect of planning and instructional plans the more logistical application of the curriculum.  I have critiqued what I view characterizes most curricular efforts in our nation’s schools, particularly curricula that are in place concerning civics education.  I find it appalling how little effort is made to make sure curricular decisions by the state or the school district are made to ensure that regular teachers are either understanding of, loyal to, or abiding by those decisions.  Most teachers are out there with little direction about what options are available or are engaged in little discussion as to curricular issues.  Please, don’t interpret this as my belief that we have a teacher corps that can be described as a bunch of mavericks.  As I just pointed out, most teachers simply follow the textbook that is chosen by a school’s administration from a limited number of approved titles.  Teachers might have a say in which text will actually be chosen, but the options available pretty much mirror each other in content and organizational structure.

I also addressed the different curricular philosophies – I called them educational philosophies – that exist.  They are perennialism, essentialism, progressivism, and reconstructionalism.  This description is a good lead into what I want to next address, curricular approaches.  Most treatments of this material begin with the curricular approaches that are out there and later describe the different prominent philosophies.  I feel it is best to reverse that order.  Philosophies get at motivation and, for me, that is always helpful to know before getting into the more specific aspects of what people are doing.  Therefore, initially getting a grasp of curricular philosophies provides useful foundational information.  If it is helpful, let me point out the postings that looked at the different philosophical traditions.  The titles and dates of these postings are A Socratic Interlude (2/19/16), No Nonsense Education (2/23/16), Live and Learn (2/26/16), The Ideological Leftists (3/1/16), and The Heroic Self (3/4/16).  If you did not catch these postings, they are available; just click the archives feature of this blog.  Those postings are arranged so as to describe the range of philosophies from the most conservative to the most liberal.  With that view of motivational orientations, one can look more confidently at the different approaches that curriculum developers utilize. 

I will point out that the field of curriculum, as Ornstein and Hunkins describe it, is a quarrelsome field.  This level of disagreement ranges from definitional issues to developmental issues to issues of implementation.  That’s right; the professionals in this field can’t even agree on what it is they are doing or what their responsibilities are.  But be calm; this debate is in academia.  For the rest of us, the field is about what is taught in our schools in terms of subject matter and its structural elements.

I noticed on TV that there is a commercial college, one that specializes in the field of management and employs an experiential instruction strategy.  This choice reflects a curricular issue and, in turn, a curricular or educational philosophy.  So if you are not satisfied with merely putting a degree on the wall, but want to bust the walls down, that’s the place for you – so I’m told.

So, my next efforts will be to convey the different approaches to curriculum.  Ornstein and Hunkins inform me that there are two basic types of approaches, the technical/scientific and the nontechnical/nonscientific types.  Under the technical/scientific there is the behavioral approach, the managerial approach, and the systems approach.  The academic approach and the reconceptionalist approach comprise the nontechnical/nonscientific type. 

If most schools are immune to the issues all these options represent and if most teachers just follow a textbook, why take the time to deal with these issues?  Because, one, being introduced to this material will provide context for what is going on in the school with which you are concerned; two, being knowledgeable of the material can be a source of ideas for what is possible or desirable in terms of curricular choices; and three, being aware of the material provides you with a language by which to discuss and, if need be, argue the related issues that curricular change entails.