Program Mission

Overview

At the University of Iowa, we take a view of curriculum studies that has clear residency in the schools and the lives of school children, and that maintains a deep association with multiple forms of research.  Students in our program are exposed to the comprehensive nature of the field, but the main focus of their education is in the application of research to school development concerns. In other words, our program aims to develop expertise with school-based research problems across the K-12 spectrum and to advance a skill set associated with curriculum development work.  Students also have the opportunity to take courses to certify themselves for school administration work and to select key cognate areas of study designed to enrich their skills in affiliative areas of inquiry.  Graduates of our program are researchers who are employable in a variety of settings. They usually move onto positions in higher education and school administration, and more rarely, state departments and private industry.

What is Curriculum Development?

The formalization of curriculum development as a practice in the American public schools can be traced to the early 20^th century and the defining principles embodied in the work of John Franklin Bobbitt.  Using a technique known as activity analysis, Bobbitt tried to identify activities in the school that he believed prepared the learner for specific tasks in life - among them vocational, socio-civic, familial and intellectual tasks.  His effort to connect the main activities of life to the actual conduct of the school represented an early systematic approach toward organizing and ultimately exercising some control over what got taught in schools.  This desire to find a way to deliberately and consciously direct the conduct of the school became the driving principle behind the rise of the curriculum field and the valorizing of a process that has since become known as curriculum development. 

Today the idea of curriculum development is still associated with the design and operation of schools, although disagreements exist over just what comprises the details of the curriculum development process.  Many educators still equate curriculum development with subject matter organization, believing that the curriculum is improved by changing or otherwise reorganizing what gets taught.  The bias inherent in such a characterization of curriculum development makes a distinction between the term curriculum and the term instruction, implying at least some analytical separation between what is taught (the curriculum) and how it is taught (instruction). The curriculum development process, however, is organic and comprehensive in its outlook.  It makes it clear that any determination about how to teach has to be done in relation to what gets taught and that any determination about what gets taught has to be understood in relation to wider learning purposes and accompanying learning effects.

Fortunately, the curriculum studies field has yielded a historical model of curriculum development that accounts for the comprehensive dimensions of the school experience. General consensus, embodied in the work of, among others, Null, Tanner and Tanner, and Hlebowitsh, points to a procedural definition of the curriculum development process that includes the tasks of planning, implementing and evaluating the school experience. Such a view necessarily accounts for some conceptualization of what gets taught (via subject matter, values and skills) as it intersects with teacher decisions over how to teach and how to demonstrate whether learning has actually taken place. Originally articulated by Tyler, and later by Taba, such a view of curriculum development can be conceived as a three-part process that includes: 1) some statement of purposes (embodied as specific objectives and content organization), 2) some instructional response on how to teach in relation to explicitly articulated purposes, and; 3) some program of evaluation of outcomes. 

As indicated, this procedural model for curriculum development is historically associated with the work of Ralph Tyler, who used four keys questions to outline the continuum from purposes to experiences to evaluation:

1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?
2. What educational experiences can be provided that is likely to attain these purposes?
3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?
4. How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?

Tyler’s questions, often referred to as the Tyler Rationale, set the foundation for the design of the school curriculum, as evidenced by later efforts to expand upon the four questions, notably in the work of Taba, who identified a seven step curriculum development process that included: 1) diagnosis of needs 2) formulation of objectives 3) selection of content 4) organization of content 5) selections of learning experiences organization of learning experiences and 7) determination of way to evaluate. The Tanners assert that Tyler and Taba worked out of a progressive tradition that had its ancestry in Dewey’s phases of reflective inquiry, which helped to frame the idea of curriculum development in relation to a problem solving process.

The act of curriculum development, however, requires thinking that goes beyond its procedural nature.  Obviously some theoretical direction has to be provided to help educators navigate through the curriculum development process, so that when educators are faced the prospect of, say, converting purposes into classroom experiences they have some theoretical direction for decision making. To this end, Tyler articulated the need for the curriculum development process to be filtered through three screens, adumbrated as: 1) studies of the learner, 2) studies of contemporary life outside of school, and 3) suggestions from subject specialists. According to the Tanner and Tanner, Tyler’s screens are isomorphic with a trinity of factors, again rooted in the work of Dewey, which accounts for the nature of the learner, the values of the society and some contemplation of worthwhile knowledge or subject matter. These three factors, when taken together, represent a complimentary theoretical framework for decision making in the curriculum development process. The framework has the direct effect of forcing educators to weight their decisions in the light of the learners’ interests and developmental needs, in the spirit of the ethical foundations of democratic living, and in the context of socially and intellectually worthwhile knowledge. These fundamental factors have been debated by Tanner and Jickling as paradigmatic to the field.

Curriculum development also has a component to it that deals with issues of implementation and deliberation.  Good implementation requires the main agents of the curriculum to be in general agreement with the normative tasks at hand and to have the resources, time and insight to complete their work, while also understanding that their work is rooted in an ongoing evaluative effort to improve the school experience.  Schwab described a process of group deliberation for the design of the curriculum whereby various participants in the operation of the school are involved in ongoing discussion and debate over what needs to be done.  He put a premium on the idea of deliberation in order to make the point that the curriculum should not be viewed as a technocratic process that reduces itself to a manual of instructions (often written by agents outside of the school community and the educational situation). The advantages of curriculum development through deliberation are obvious. Where group deliberation prevails, the curriculum is necessarily kept connected to the particularities of the local situation. Group deliberation also pays a democratic dividend and gives the curriculum the benefit of drawing ideas from multiple perspectives of expertise and experience. Additionally, the key players in the curriculum development process, most notably the teachers, take practical possession of the school curriculum because of their part in determining it.

Finally, it should be noted that term curriculum development is also loaded with political meaning, especially among a growing rank of scholars who have broadened the meaning (and the use) of the term “curriculum’ in a way that leaves it with a weakened connection to schools.  Pinar, for instance, believes that curriculum needs to be understood as symbolic representation, as institutional and discursive practices, structures, images and experiences.  Such a characterization of the curriculum undeniably represents a distancing from the construct of curriculum development.  Pinar and others, in fact, have explicitly waged battle against the Tylerian idea of curriculum development, proclaiming it to be no longer relevant to the work of the curriculum scholar. The problem, as they see it, is that the act of curriculum development is tied to an administrative (and patriarchal) impulse to impose unreasonable control and authority on school teachers and school children.  Such a criticism has had a considerable following in the curriculum field and has led some scholars to reject the term curriculum development as an oppressive and imperialistic construct.

The normative design and general operation of the school experience cannot be accomplished without engaging in the act of curriculum development. The idea of translating purposes into experiences that yield effects needing to be understood in relation to originally stated purposes is at the heart of curriculum development. The entire process is screened against a theoretical framework that requires all judgments to be made in relation to the nature of the learner, the values of the society and some judgment of worthwhile subject matter. This is a principled view of curriculum development sanctioned by a long line of work emerging mostly from the progressive educational literature.

References

Bobbitt, J.F. (originally 1918/1972). The curriculum. New York: Arno Press.

Dewey, J (1902). The child and the curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Dewey, J (1929). The sources of a science of education. New York: Liveright

Hlebowitsh, P. (2005). Designing the School Curriculum. Boston: Allyn Bacon.

Jickling, B. (1988). Paradigms in Curriculum Development: Critical Comments on the work of Tanner and Tanner, A Tough Nut: A rejoinder to Robin Barrow and to Daniel and Laurel Tanner, Interchange 19(2) 41-67.

Null, J.W. (2008). Curriculum Development in Historical Perspective. In Connelly, F. Michael (ed.)    The Sage Handbook of Curriculum and Instruction. Los Angeles, Sage Publications. 

Pinar, W and others (1995). Understanding Curriculum New York: Peter Lang.

Schwab, J.J. (1983). The Practical 4: Something for Curriculum Professors to Do. Curriculum Inquiry 13 (Fall): 239-265.

Taba, H. (1962). Curriculum development: Theory and practice. Harcourt Brace: New York 

Tanner, D and Tanner, L.N. (2007). Curriculum Development: Theory into practice (4^th ed.). Macmillan: New York

Tanner, D and Tanner, L. (1988) The Emergence of a Paradigm in the Curriculum Field: A Reply to Jickling, Interchange 19(2) 41-67

Tyler, R.W. (1949). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press