Theorising conceptualisations: curriculum and professional identity
3.5 Approaches and models of curriculum development
The first approach to curriculum development described above produces a technocratic curriculum as a document, a product or plan. It is understood as the end product of a rational design process, starting with the setting of objectives, the neutral selection of knowledge to achieve those aims, sequencing the content into an appropriate order, and transmitting it to students. This was the dominant model in education theory for many years, following Tyler’s 1949 model of curriculum design (Tyler, 1964). It outlined a precise and efficient behaviourist method for producing a “curriculum as plan or product”. This view held sway during an era that valued scientific rigour and bureaucratic accountability.
The starting point for curriculum planning was the setting of educational objectives, and the planning focus was on what was intended as a prescriptive syllabus outline. What this approach fails to take into account is that proposals on paper (the official curriculum) often do not reflect the reality of the “curriculum in (as) practice”. Examples of the official
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curriculum appear in faculty hand books or as module outlines, and on university websites as the “contents” or “syllabus” for particular subjects. The written or official curriculum is reflected in the organisational structure, the timetable, credit-point weighting of modules and the sequencing of subjects within degree programmes. To some extent, the introduction of outcomes-based education and a National Qualifications Framework (NQF) in South Africa in 1997, although intending that outcomes be more widely conceptualised than “learning objectives”, raised concerns regarding the starting-point of curriculum planning that it shared with the Tyler model.
“Curriculum as content” is another model that reflects a popularly-held view amongst many educators who have not been exposed to more recent literature on curriculum theory. The idea that there is an objective corpus of knowledge to be taught to students (in each subject) ignores the potential for privileging certain knowledge, the influences of personal ideological bias in selecting content, and the question of whose knowledge should be prioritised. This theorizing is particularly pertinent to the context of the present study which concerns a system of law where the selection of the subject matter of what is taught is decidedly partial and subjective. In South African law, this debate is fundamental, since there is contestation in relation to the very historical validity of an inherited legal system (Roman-Dutch law) as a part of a pluralistic legal system in which different laws apply to different citizens (customary law and common law). This approach to curriculum deliberately avoids the demand to address urgent issues of transformation in the curriculum and in the widest sense of the legitimacy of aspects of the legal system. In a discipline where the legal regulatory framework relating to new first-world transactions (intellectual property rights, internet banking) is being extended and developed daily, alongside a legislative framework committed to redressing urgent socio-economic issues of poverty, access to basic rights, such as water, primary health care and housing, the selection of materials and topics, as well as the choice of decided cases as legal precedents that are used as illustrative examples, cannot be regarded as a value-neutral exercise.
This idea of curriculum as process is a third model which places value on the individual learner’s autonomy, asking what processes are important for the students to develop their
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potential fully (Kelly, 1989). This approach is perhaps best represented by the following definition:
A curriculum is an attempt to communicate the essential principles and features of an educational proposal into such a form that it is open to critical scrutiny and capable of effective translation into practice (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 45).
Rather than having curricular debate confined to specific subject matter Stenhouse (1975) shifted attention instead to the implications of enhancing students’ understanding and judgement by inducting them into the ways of thinking and of constructing knowledge embraced within a broad conception of disciplinary knowledge. This approach, of teaching law students “to think like lawyers”, has attained a level of popularity in American and Australian law schools (Weisbrot, 2001). As yet, however, in South Africa, the mindset of legal academics, seeing themselves primarily as lawyers (Cownie, 1999), indicates their often limited interest in their teaching role. The scant attention paid to the limited scholarship on legal education in South African law journals and at law teachers’
conferences is evidence of this attitude (see section 2.5.4). Furthermore, the prevalent mode of delivery to students, the large class lecture, which is premised on a “transmission”
mode of teaching, makes it impossible to “induct them into ways of thinking and constructing knowledge” (Tishman, Jay, & Perkins, 1992). South African law academics’
focus in teaching is lecturing on what they believe to be an “essential body of substantive legal doctrine” This is further borne out in the limited number of curricular offerings on skills development and clinical law teaching, and the silence on teaching ethics in most law faculties (see section 5.1). The largely shared and similar emphasis in curricula at all South African law faculties on “core curriculum content” suggests that curriculum as process is not a commonly-held conception of curriculum.
Current views on curriculum acknowledge the socially-constructed and value-laden nature of conceptions of curriculum, curriculum-making, curriculum change and practice. A conception of curriculum as what happens in the (lecture) classroom, as “an ongoing social interaction between students, teachers, knowledge and milieu”, reflects the influences of the structural context (the institution, the faculty, the ethos created by the lecturer) as well as the socio-cultural context (the social, political, demographic, economic features) impacting on the teaching and learning experience (Cornbleth, 1990). A similar awareness of
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the dynamic social process encapsulated within the notion of curriculum is Grundy’s idea of
“curriculum as praxis”, which is characterised as a “personalised and reflective” approach, rather than a contextualised orientation (1987). In the next section, the specific meanings attached to curriculum in higher education will be reviewed. Perhaps the following description captures the essence of curriculum most accurately:
[curriculum is] more than a textbook, more than a classroom, and more than teachers and students. It is all the social influences, populist crises, military campaigns and historical moments that shape our lives – when we are in school [university] and in our lives beyond the classroom (Carey, 2006, p. 4).
In the next section, a specific focus on the ways in which curriculum has been theorised in higher education will be addressed.