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.
[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.
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