What Curriculum Means

Ask three people what a curriculum is and you may get three answers. One points to the textbook. One points to the timetable on the staffroom wall. One says it is everything a child picks up between the morning bell and the walk home. None of them is fully wrong, and that is exactly the problem the field starts with. Curriculum is a broad word, and it has been getting broader as research in different cultures and settings keeps stretching it.

Where the word comes from

Curriculum comes from the Latin word currere, which named a racecourse, a track laid out for running. The same root gives a few related senses: a course to follow, a prescribed path, and a series of courses that make up a full program of study.

When educators borrowed the word, they kept that sense of a set path. A curriculum became a course of study laid out for learners to complete, at a given grade level, over a fixed stretch of time. A learner in Grade 6 follows the Grade 6 course; a class works through it across the school year. The track is marked out in advance, and the learners run it.

Flashcard

What is the Latin root of the word curriculum?

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Answer

Currere, meaning a racecourse

The root also carries the senses of a course to follow and a series of courses that make up a program of study. Education borrowed it to mean a prescribed course of study at a grade level.

The narrow meaning and the broad meaning

In its narrow meaning, curriculum is the content: the subjects to be taught and the material to be covered. A narrow reading of “the Grade 8 curriculum” is the list of topics in each subject plus the way they will be examined. This meaning is easy to point at, which is why so many people stop there.

The broad meaning goes much further. It takes in the syllabus and the subject list, but also the methods of teaching, the timetable, the organization of teaching and learning, and the items of knowledge to be covered. Put most simply, the broad meaning of curriculum is this: the sum total of all the experiences a learner goes through under the guidance of the school.

That broad definition is the one the field tends to work from, because it captures what actually happens. A learner does not only absorb the listed topics. They absorb the way the class is run, the habits the school rewards, and the relationships built along the way. All of that is curriculum in the broad sense.

A product or a process

The older way of thinking treated curriculum as a product: a fixed body of content that a learner collects and that can be counted up at the end of the year. On this view, the curriculum is the stack of material covered, and a year of school is the work of gathering it.

A view that took shape in the 1920s reframed curriculum as a process rather than a product. The change matters. As a process, the curriculum starts on the first day of school and runs through everything that follows: the morning assembly, the lessons in class, the activities at break and play, the close of the day when learners go home carrying what they gained. It does not wait to exist until the syllabus is finished. It is happening the whole time.

This is why the broad definition and the process view fit together. If curriculum is the sum of a learner’s experiences, then it is unfolding moment by moment, not sitting in a textbook waiting to be delivered.

Flashcard

In one line, what is curriculum in its broad sense?

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Answer

The sum total of all experiences a learner goes through under the school

Not only the listed subjects and content, but the methods, the organization, the activities, and the relationships. This broad sense pairs with the idea of curriculum as a process that runs all year.

Flashcard

What changed when the field moved from product to process thinking?

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Answer

Curriculum became something that happens, not something collected

The product view counted up material at year end. The process view, shaped in the 1920s, sees curriculum running from day one through every lesson, activity, and break.