Spring 2015 Course
CI 501 Fundamentals of Curriculum Development
Mark Dressman, Instructor
Tuesdays, 4:00-6:50, 323 Education
Catalog Description.
Examines a variety of definitions of curriculum development; readings reflect current theories and research related to substantive issues in the field: how learning is influenced by stated goals of education, cultural background of the learners, structure of the school setting, competencies of teachers, psychological characteristics of the learners, and means of measuring student achievement.
Course Overview
The central goal of this course is to provide an introduction to past and current theories of curriculum as these are applied to the development of curriculum for specific students, subject areas, and age/grade levels. In the first section of the course, we will review a wide range of approaches to curriculum development, past and present, with an eye to developing a critical view of the implications, advantages, and challenges of each and extrapolating from them some basic principles of curriculum development and design. These approaches will include but are not limited to Critical Pedagogy; Community-Based/Service Learning; Standards-Based designs; Understanding by Design; multiple Constructivist approaches, including workshops; Project-Based Learning; Didaktik; Discipline-Based Arts Education; online and web-based approaches; and any other specific approaches that course participants might suggest.
In the second section of the course, students will apply the critical framework extrapolated from our analysis of general curricular approaches to the analysis of a specific curriculum with which they are familiar, such as the literacy workshop, foreign language education, specific approaches to science or mathematics, or approaches to social education, and write a critical “interrogation” of the implications, advantages, and challenges posed by a particular curriculum.
The third section of the course will become a workshop, in which students will take principles and ideas acquired in the first two sections of the course to rewrite and redesign a curricular approach to a particular area of interest to them professionally. The culminating activity of the course will be a curriculum fair, in which students will present their redesigned curriculum, along with an argument for why and how it improves on existing curricular approaches, to the class.
Readings:
Schiro, M.S. (2012). Curriculum theory: Conflicing vision and enduring concerns (2nd Ed.). Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage.
Elmore, R. F. (2004). School reform from the inside out: Policy, practice, and performance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
