The Three Questions of Curriculum
The Three Questions of Curriculum
The three basic questions
- What knowledge is worthwhile?
- Why is it worthwhile?
- How is it to be acquired?
Three areas the field studies
- Perspectives: the nature and views of curriculum.
- Paradigm: the framework and steps for developing a curriculum.
- Practice: applying a framework to build one.
What a curriculum shapes
- Teacher training, both pre-service and in-service.
- Textbooks, resource materials, and teaching aids.
- Activities for learners.
- Financial planning and educational research.
Behind every curriculum sit three questions. They look simple, almost too simple to bother writing down, but every real decision a school makes about what to teach is an answer to one of them. Get the three questions clear and the rest of the field falls into place.
The three questions are: what knowledge is worthwhile, why is it worthwhile, and how is it acquired. They form the backbone of curriculum work. A curriculum is, at bottom, a worked-out answer to all three at once.
What knowledge is worthwhile
The first question forces a choice. No school can teach everything, so someone has to decide which knowledge earns a place. Choosing reading and arithmetic over a dozen other skills is an answer to this question. So is choosing to include a second language, or a trade, or moral education.
The question has no neutral answer. What counts as worthwhile depends on what a society values and what it expects its young people to be able to do. That is why the same subject can sit at the centre of one curriculum and be missing from another.
What knowledge is worthwhile?
It forces a choice, because no school can teach everything. Deciding which knowledge earns a place in the curriculum is the work this question names.
Why it is worthwhile
The second question asks for a reason. It is not enough to say a topic is worthwhile; a curriculum has to be able to say why. The reason might be that the knowledge is useful in daily life, that it prepares learners for work, that it builds character, or that it carries a culture forward.
This question keeps a curriculum honest. A topic that no one can justify is a topic that may be there out of habit. Asking why a piece of knowledge is worthwhile is how a curriculum decides what to keep and what to drop.
How it is acquired
The third question turns to method. Once a school has decided that some knowledge is worthwhile and can say why, it still has to work out how learners will actually take hold of it. If a topic is important, what is the best way to teach it?
This is where teaching and learning methods come in: the move from simple to complex, the use of activity and experience, the order in which things are taught. The third question is the bridge from deciding to teach something to actually teaching it.
How is the knowledge to be acquired?
It turns from choosing and justifying content to method: the best way for learners to take hold of knowledge once it has earned a place in the curriculum.
The three areas the field studies
These three questions open out into the way the whole field is organized. Curriculum study tends to move through three areas, and this guide follows the same path.
The first area is perspectives: the nature of curriculum and the different views people hold about it. The second is paradigm: the framework and the steps a developer follows to build a curriculum. The third is practice: taking one framework and using it to produce a real curriculum, with its teaching and learning activities and methods. Perspectives ask what curriculum is, paradigm asks how to build one, and practice does the building.
What these questions shape
The three questions are not an academic exercise. The answers a school settles on ripple out into nearly everything it produces.
- Teacher training: both pre-service programs that prepare new teachers and in-service programs that keep serving teachers current.
- Resource materials: textbooks, guide books, activity books, and teaching software.
- Learner activities: the tasks and experiences arranged for students.
- Financial planning: the funding those activities and resources need.
- Educational research: the study of what is working in classrooms, so future practice can improve.
Because so much depends on them, the three questions matter most in the places that prepare teachers. A school or college that trains teachers is, in effect, training people to answer these questions well for the learners they will one day teach.
Teacher training and resource materials
The answers also shape learner activities, financial planning, and educational research. The three questions reach into nearly everything a school produces, which is why they sit at the foundation of the field.
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