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Curriculum Development
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Curriculum as Experience

📝 Cheat Sheet

Curriculum as Experience

The core idea

  1. Means and ends are parts of one process: experience.
  2. The real curriculum is what is actually learned, not what was planned.
  3. Curriculum is meaning the learner experiences, not facts to memorise.

The teacher’s role

  1. The teacher is a facilitator of growth.
  2. Curriculum grows out of teacher and learner dialogue.

The four commonplaces

  1. Teacher.
  2. Learner.
  3. Subject matter.
  4. Setting. When any one changes, the experience and its results change.

Currere

  1. From the Latin verb “to run,” meaning the lived experience of running the course.

The fifth image is the most modern of the seven, and it turns the others on their head. The earlier images locate the curriculum in something fixed: a list of subjects, a plan, a set of outcomes, a cultural inheritance. This image locates it in something that cannot be fixed in advance at all: the actual experience of the learner.

Means and ends as one process

The starting idea is that educational means and ends are not two separate things but parts of a single process called experience. You cannot cleanly separate where you are going from how you get there, because the going is itself part of the arriving. To attend to one’s experience reflectively, and to keep anticipating and watching the consequences of one’s thoughts and actions, is a curriculum that is always evolving.

This reframes the teacher. The teacher is no longer the deliverer of fixed content but a facilitator of growth. The curriculum is the process of experiencing a sense of meaning and direction, and that sense comes out of dialogue between teacher and learner. It is built in the room, between people, not handed down ready-made.

Planned is not the same as learned. The experience image insists on this gap. A school can deliver a flawless plan and still produce learning no one intended. This image asks us to grasp what is actually learned rather than assume the planned intents were learned. That question returns later in the guide, when evaluation checks whether objectives were really met.
❓ Pop Quiz
A class follows the official plan exactly, yet a survey shows the learners took away something quite different from what was intended. The experience image of curriculum would say the real curriculum was:
Flashcard
On the experience image, what is the real curriculum?
Tap to reveal
Answer

What the learner actually lives through and learns

Not the plan, not the syllabus, not the intended outcomes. The curriculum is the meaning the learner experiences. A school must grasp what is actually learned, not assume the plan was learned.

The four commonplaces of experience

If the curriculum is the learner’s experience, then anything that shapes that experience shapes the curriculum. Four things do this work. They are sometimes called the four commonplaces of curricular experience.

CommonplaceWhat it brings to the experience
TeacherGuidance, questions, and the dialogue that gives direction
LearnerThe mind that reflects, engages, and makes meaning
Subject matterThe content that gives substance to the learning
SettingThe place and conditions in which it all happens

The important claim is that these four are always interacting, and a change in any one of them changes the experience. The same lesson with a different teacher is a different curriculum. The same teacher in a different setting produces a different result. Because these shifts are always occurring, the curriculum that meets each learner is never quite the same twice. Ends and means stay united in constant interaction.

❓ Pop Quiz
A teacher delivers the identical lesson to two classes in very different rooms and gets noticeably different learning. Which idea from the experience image explains this?
Flashcard
What are the four commonplaces of curricular experience?
Tap to reveal
Answer

Teacher, learner, subject matter, and setting

These four always interact, and a change in any one changes the experience and its results. This is why the same plan rarely produces the same learning twice.

Currere: the lived experience

The most distinctive label for this image is currere. It comes from the same Latin root as curriculum, but where curriculum took the noun sense of a racecourse, currere takes the verb sense: to run the course, to live through it. Curriculum as currere is the lived experience of the learner moving through their education.

On this view, the question “what subject is being taught” matters less than the question “what does the learner actually live through, and what knowledge and skills grow out of that.” Two learners sitting in the same lesson are running two different courses, because each is having their own experience. The lived experience, not the timetable, is the curriculum.

❓ Pop Quiz
What does the idea of curriculum as 'currere' emphasise?
Flashcard
How does currere relate to the word curriculum?
Tap to reveal
Answer

Same Latin root, but the verb sense

Curriculum took the noun sense of a racecourse, a fixed track. Currere takes the verb sense, “to run the course.” It names the learner’s lived experience of moving through their education.

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Last updated on • Talha
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