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FrontPage

Page history last edited by Jenn Gutierrez 10 years, 3 months ago

A Comparative Curriculum Analysis of One Independent School

and the Educational Philosophies of Five Theorists

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BACKGROUND AND DEFENSE

Writers know—you start with what you know. I’m pursuing a doctorate degree in curriculum and instruction not because I aspire to climb the ladder to a position like Head of School or Superintendent or some such, but rather because I’m interested. I’m interested in knowing how best to teach our kids. And I’m interested in knowing how best to teach our kids because I love humanity. I value it and believe that a society filled with adults who were given great educations and opportunities as children will be a phenomenally good society. I am deeply interested in answering Socrates’ timeless question—what is The Good Life?

Naturally then, I am a working educator—and also not surprisingly, a mother. And as such, I cannot help but read through the colored lenses of those two roles. For me, a self evaluation of my learning during my first course in curriculum instruction cannot be conducted as an isolated body of knowledge. It is intricately woven within my a posteriori understandings of having worked with learners of all ages and social backgrounds. It even resonates with the core of my own educational coming of age. I admit, therefore, that my evaluation is then unavoidably biased and may consequently look very different from the point of view of a learner who is single, childless and has not yet stood at the front of a classroom.

After a few days of struggling to come up with a project that does not directly reflect back to my understanding of the material in conjunction with what I know through experience, I decided that any project I came up with that looked independent of my current roles would simply not be as genuine or as meaningful as one I came up with that embraced those roles and allowed them to play a part.

That is why this project is a comparative curriculum analysis of The Colorado Springs School, where I teach (emphasis on my own teaching in the Middle School), and two to three key educational philosophies of five theorists, which is what my final course evaluation asks me to focus on. There are countless other great theorists that could later be included and a great deal more that could be evaluated with regard to each theorist, but this project will limit itself to the five authors I was asked to read in class and further limited to a few essential ideas from each.

THE BASICS

Any dialogue begins with a set of terminology. When we talk about curriculum, we need to first evaluate the terms we use to define it. The following list of terms is provided to facilitate our dialogue:

intended curriculum	is that which is intended, that which we hope to impart to students	We can discover a school's intended curriculum by looking at its published material
operational curriculum	is that which "is" occurring within a school at that particular moment in time	We can discover a school's operational curriculum by observing the school directly
received curriculum	is that which students "are" in fact getting	We can discover a school's received curriculum by interviewing and surveying the students themselves
null curriculum	is that which is "not" taking place	This may be an aspect of the curriculum that is overlooked or has actually been cut (for instance, if a school does away with P.E. or industrial arts, they become "null")
hidden curriculum	is that which we are unconsciously (and negatively) teaching	If, for instance, teachers decide to turn all quizzing into a game where there is a winner and a loser, we are unconsciously teaching that winning is the ultimate prize rather than the knowledge they're using to achieve that status
implicit curriculum	is that which is going on (positively), but not necessarily intended	If, for instance, a teacher stops the class for a moment to respond to a class's social needs, she is showing them that respecting and responding to other's momentary needs is important
shadow curriculum	that which we do not like but once we realize that and reflect upon it, we can bring some balance to our understanding	For instance, at the school the notion of standardized testing is often a well hated one. However, reflecting upon what we hate about it and what the original justifications for standardized testing were, perhaps we can balance our curriculum with those things we find of value in such testing (the notion, for instance, that standardization was intended to equal playing fields)
enacted curriculum	is curriculum that occurs when teachers and students come together to create the curriculum	Although not done across the board at the school, I am happy to say that the school does display quite a few instances of enacted curriculum where teachers do not know the exact outcome of a lesson because there is enough room for students to help direct the curriculum.

Want to cement these terms to memory?

Click on the following link to practice with interactive online quizzing

(Once you click on it, you will be taken outside this page to Quizlet--Once there

you can click on familiarize, learn, test and play, all of which will

provide you with memorization practice. To return to this page, you can

hit the back button or use your history tool located on the browser)

Intro to Curriculum Interactive Quiz

OUR THEORISTS

At this point, we begin making our comparative curriculum analysis of the school and the five theorists of focus: Ralph Tyler, William Ayers, E.D. Hirsch, Sonia Nieto and Richard Louv. As part of the course, I kept a journal of each theorist. The journal includes a brief summary of the author's ideas and my own reflection of those ideas and serves as the primary basis for the ideas I evaluate against the school's curriculum. If you would like to read these entries to gain familiarization with the theorists, you may click on the author's name the first time he or she is mentioned. To minimize the length of this Front Page, I have organized each analysis into a separate page. You can click on the links provided to navigate to those pages.

Curriculum at the Independent School and the Ideas of Ralph Tyler (Emphasis on Formulation of Curriculum Objectives)

Curriculum at the school and the Ideas of Richard Louv (Emphasis on Nature)

Curriculum at the school and the Ideas of William Ayers (Emphasis on Learner Driven Outcomes)

Curriculum at the school and the Ideas of E.D. Hirsch Jr.(Emphasis on Reading Pedagogy and Core Knowledge)

Curriculum at the school and the Ideas of Sonia Nieto (Emphasis on Multicultural Education and its Merit)