Designing Curriculum: Theory and Practice (Classroom and Asynchronous E-Learning)
About This Course
Below is a list of topics that form the focus of each part of the course. It should be noted that these topics will be discussed in an iterative or spiral fashion largely through active interactions with existing curricula and practices in curriculum designing and enactment. The topics are connected to one another in important ways and should not be understood as neat, stand-alone areas of exploration.
Part 1: The Teacher and the Curriculum
- Conceptions of curriculum
- The interplay between philosophical understandings of humanity, the purpose(s) of education, epistemology, psychology, society, politics, and curriculum
- Teachers' relationship with curriculum
Part 2: The Elements of Curriculum and Curriculum Designing
- The elements of curriculum
- Factors and considerations influencing curriculum designing and enactment
- Intended and unintended consequences of curriculum
- Identifying and interpreting curriculum issues within the classroom
- Curriculum designing as a situated cognitive activity.
Part 3: Teachers as Curriculum Designers
- Curriculum designing as collective deliberation over multiple concerns.
- Design ethics and curriculum designing and enactment.
- The theory-practice nexus in curriculum designing and enactment.
- Rethinking teachers' relationship with curriculum and their roles in curriculum designing and enactment.
What You'll Learn
1. Develop theoretically sound and practically useful conceptions of curriculum and curriculum designing.
2. Come to appreciate fully the teachers agency and responsibility as curriculum designer.
3. Come to embrace, in real practical terms, empathy and compassion, and hence human-centred design, as the core values of curriculum designing and enactment.
4. Understand how curriculum theory and practice can mutually inform, (re)shape, and improve each other.
Part 1
Course participants will:
1. Be able to examine and understand curriculum and curriculum designing using different theoretical conceptions and from multiple perspectives.
2. Be able to use different theories and perspectives to critically and reflexively reflect on their lived experiences and beliefs about curriculum.
Part 2
Course participants will:
1. Be able to understand the relationships between the various elements of curriculum.
2. Be able to critically analyse and evaluate the various factors and considerations that influence curriculum designing and enactment.
3. Be able to critically analyse and evaluate the various consequences of curriculum designing and enactment.
Part 3
Course participants will:
1. Be able to respond, in educationally and ethically defensible ways, to curriculum problems and anticipated consequences of curriculum decisions.
2. Be able to bring relevant theoretical conceptions to bear on their curriculum practice and to use their curriculum experiences to refine their theoretical understandings of curriculum and curriculum designing and enactment.
3. Be able to participate meaningfully and effectively in curriculum-designing activities.