The document summarizes a workshop on curriculum design theory and practice. It discusses different definitions of curriculum, including focusing on content, restrictions, or the wider purpose. Paradigms for curriculum design include focusing on products, processes, or praxis. Approaches discussed include Tyler's rational planning, Bruner's spiral curriculum, curriculum as a planned process, constructive alignment, and curriculum as a social process. The workshop emphasizes developing students' knowledge, skills, and attitudes; challenging students; and making learning meaningful through choices.

1. Critical curriculum design:
theory and practice
Tansy Jessop
SLTI Workshop
16 May 2017
@tansyjtweets

2. Today’s session
• Your definitions of curriculum
• Diamond nine
• Three problems with curriculum design
• Theories of curriculum design
• So what guidance do we have from curriculum theory?

3. Defining curriculum
Write a short definition of what you think curriculum is.

4. Diamond Nine
• You have 15 statements about
curriculum
• Agree nine statements to
• create your diamond 9
• Place your favourites
towards the top, discard your
six least favourite

5. Curriculum paradigms
PRODUCT: structuring and managing content (WHAT)
PROCESS: the lived experience (HOW)
PRAXIS: wider purpose of HE, social justice, equality (WHY)

6. Curriculum (n) running, chariot, course

7. Three problems with HE curriculum
design

8. Problem 1: Focus on content
The curriculum is a
handy container for
content

9. Problem 2: Restrictions are overplayed

10. Problem 3: Wider picture missing

11. Approaches to curriculum design
1) Rational Curriculum Planning (Tyler 1949)
2) Bruner’s Spiral Curriculum (1960)
3) Curriculum as planned process (Stenhouse 1975)
4) Constructive Alignment (Biggs 1999; 2003)
5) Curriculum as ‘being’ in the world (Barnett and Coate, 2005)
6) Curriculum as social process: Pinar (2011); Blackmore and
Kandiko (2014

12. Paradigm What it looks like
Technical rational Focus on data and tools
Relational Focus on people
Emancipatory Focus on systems and structures

13. Bruner’s Spiral Curriculum
(1) The student revisits a
topic, theme or subject
(2) The complexity of the
topic or theme increases
with each revisit
(3) New learning has a
relationship with old
learning and is put in
context with the old
information.

14. There can be no curriculum development
without teacher development
(Stenhouse 1975)

15. Outcomes-based education
Learning outcomes mark the move from teacher-
directed to student-centred learning
(Brooks et al. 2014).
Dominant discourse in HE. Argued that it puts the
emphasis on the student.

19. From our students’ point of view, assessment always
defines the curriculum (Ramsden 1992).
How shall we assess the students to reap the learning
and development our discipline requires and we see as
important?
What do we see as important?

20. Your ideal graduate
Choose your top three attributes.
Go to www.menti.com and use the code 57 73 85

22. University of Sydney’s simple
generic graduate attributes
1. Scholarship: An attitude or stance towards knowledge
2. Global citizenship: An attitude or stance towards the
world
3. Lifelong learning: An attitude or stance towards
themselves
(Barrie 2004)

24. A new model (Barnett and Coate 2005)
• Knowing is about content
• Acting is about becoming a
historian, actor,
psychologist, or
philosopher
• Being is about
understanding yourself,
orienting yourself and
relating your knowledge
and action to the world
Knowing
Being
Acting

25. Reframing Barnett
• What is about content
• How is about becoming a
historian, actor,
psychologist, or
philosopher
• Why is about
understanding yourself,
orienting yourself and
relating your knowledge
and action to the world
What
Why
How

26. Curriculum as ‘complicated
conversation’ (Pinar 2011)
Social practice fosters opportunities for students and
lecturers to recognise… its tacit articulation of particular
values and power relations
Academic coherence emerges out of a shared
awareness of the curriculum as a socially constructed
experience between student, lecturer, and a disciplinary
tradition.
Blackmore and Kandiko 2012

27. Take two
1. Which of these
curriculum
approaches has any
resonance for you?
2. What about it makes
sense?
3. Why?

28. Educational principles
• Help students to see connections across units
• Challenge students and set high expectations
• Less is more: sacrifice content for depth and active
engagement
• Students need ‘time on task’
• Be both contemporary and classical
• Provide students with choices to make learning
meaningful to them
• Teaching is messy and relational – don’t get hung up
on the technical apparatus

29. References
Barnett, R. and Coate, K. 2005. Engaging the Curriculum in
Higher Education. Maidenhead. Open University Press.
Barrie, S. 2004. A research‐based approach to generic
graduate attributes policy, Higher Education Research &
Development, 23:3, 261-275
Biggs, J. and Tang, C. 1999. Teaching for Quality Learning at
University. Maidenhead. Open University Press.
Collini, S. 2012. What are universities for? Penguin.
Felten. P. et al. The Undergraduate Experience. Jossey-Bass.
Pinar, W. 2011. What is Curriculum Theory? Routledge.