Curriculum as Tasks and Social Reconstruction
Curriculum as Tasks and Social Reconstruction
Image 6: discrete tasks and concepts
- Curriculum is a set of tasks to be mastered.
- Each task leads to a specified, behavioural end.
- Borrowed from training in business, industry, and the military.
- Skills broken into constituent behaviours; knowledge into cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and social parts.
Image 7: social reconstruction
- Assumes no society is perfect and education exists to improve it.
- Curriculum is an agenda of knowledge and values for improving society.
- Ranges from teaching set changes to building critical thinking and the will to ask what should change, how, and why.
The last two images sit far apart. One comes from the world of job training and breaks learning into small, checkable pieces. The other comes from a vision of education as a force for changing society. Putting them side by side shows how wide the field of curriculum really is.
Image 6: curriculum as discrete tasks and concepts
This image treats curriculum as a set of tasks to be mastered. Each task is assumed to lead to a specified end, and that end usually has a behavioural meaning: the learner can do a new task, or do an old one better than before. Learning is broken into pieces, and the curriculum is the ordered set of those pieces.
The approach was borrowed from the training programs of business, industry, and the military, where complex jobs are taught by breaking them into trainable steps. Just as a skill can be defined by the smaller behaviours that make it up, knowledge and appreciation can be analysed into the concepts that characterise them: cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and social. The curriculum becomes a map of these parts, each one a task to be checked off.
The strength here is clarity and trackability. The risk is that learning which does not break cleanly into tasks can get left out, and the bigger picture can dissolve into a pile of separate skills.
A set of tasks to be mastered, each leading to a specified end
Borrowed from job training, it breaks skills into constituent behaviours and breaks knowledge into cognitive, affective, psychomotor, and social parts. Each part is a task to check off.
Image 7: curriculum as an agenda for social reconstruction
The seventh image starts from a bold assumption: no society or culture is perfect, and the purpose of education is to improve it. On this view, the school should hand learners an agenda of knowledge and values that guides them to improve society and the institutions, beliefs, and activities that hold it up.
How that agenda is set can vary. It may draw heavily on input from learners themselves, or it may be shaped mostly by the decisions of teachers and educators about how learners should be taught to reconstruct society. Either way, the curriculum is pointed outward, at the world the learners will go on to change.
The method ranges across a wide span. At one end, the school simply teaches learners the desirable changes that ought to be made. At the other, it equips them with critical thinking and a genuine desire to keep asking the hard questions: what should be changed, how, and why? In both cases the curriculum is an agenda for cultural reconstruction, but the second trusts learners to direct the change themselves.
Give learners an agenda to improve an imperfect society
It assumes no society is perfect and education exists to make it better. Methods range from teaching set changes to building critical thinking and the will to ask what should change, how, and why.
From teaching set changes to building critical questioners
At one end, learners are simply taught the changes that should be made. At the other, they gain critical thinking and the drive to ask what should be changed, how, and why, and to act on it.
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