Theorising conceptualisations: curriculum and professional identity
3.3 Curriculum possibilities: what are the meanings of
“curriculum?”
This section describes theory relating to the nature of curriculum, the ways in which curricula are developed, and contesting conceptions of curriculum. This is followed by a discussion of theoretical insights concerning the component parts of curricula, and the section concludes with a review of curriculum theory in the context of higher education.
The concept of curriculum is a particularly vague and multi-faceted one, giving rise to an endless range of interpretations which are often not shared, nor indeed articulated, by
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academics in higher education (S. P. Fraser & Bosanquet, 2006, p. 269). Curriculum is a concept associated with “fluidity”, “instability”, “elusiveness” “invisibility” and “liquidity”, all of which underline the difficulty of grasping a single, clear understanding of what the term embraces (Barnett & Coate, 2005, p. 153). Barnett and Coate make an observation that is especially pertinent to university curricula in current times of dramatic change in higher education provision, namely that
A university curriculum is always a curriculum in process. It is dynamic and in flux, and is also a site of contested interpretations. A curriculum is fluid and is not- cannot- be caught by any schema or template.…Curricula in higher education now have to be charged with the responsibility of encouraging the formation of human wherewithal that is adequate to an age of fluidity (Barnett & Coate, 2005, p. 51).
The authors emphasise the elusiveness, the “shadowy” nature of curriculum, based on the many different interpretations of the term, as discussed above. It is possibly that this conceptual ambiguity, the difficulty of establishing a shared meaning amongst academics in higher education, that explains why so little attention is paid to the topic at that level.
Ratcliff identified a familiar misapprehension that arises in higher education circles when dealing with curriculum change:
When a committee, a Dean, or a department chair contemplates changing the curriculum, it is dangerously easy to make an assumption that everyone agrees on what curriculum is.…Making this leap of faith can lead to unnecessary disputes over nomenclatures, and worse, aborted attempts at fundamental change (Ratcliff, 1997, p. 5).
Another explanation for the silence of teachers’ voices in curriculum debate is that a new vocabulary of terms has marginalised the traditional educational discourses of curriculum theory, pedagogy and learning theory. The new international managerial discourse of
“consumers, providers, accountability and performance”, which has its origins in industry and commerce, appears to have swept into place curriculum changes attuned to globalisation and neoliberal agendas with scant input from teachers (Elliot, 1998, p. 34).
Curriculum embraces a multiplicity of meanings that differ from context to context, ranging from understandings of curriculum-as-designed, as opposed to curriculum-in-action, or tacit assumptions of curriculum that can be inferred from written documents that reflect the
“official curriculum”. Teaching practices may reflect the “enacted curriculum”, while the
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“null curriculum” is another abiding feature in law curricula, serving to omit selected knowledge from inclusion in modules (Barnett & Coate, 2005, p. 152; S. P. Fraser &
Bosanquet, 2006, p. 282). In legal education, this feature intrudes to a deeper structural level in the choice of electives offered, the sequencing and credit-point weighting attached to different subjects, and the exclusion of certain subjects at some universities altogether.
Subjects such as Customary (African or Indigenous) Law and Race and Gender Law are positioned at vastly different levels of study where they do appear as compulsory modules, while other universities place an inordinately strong emphasis on commercial law or criminal law subjects (see section 5.1 of this thesis).
Much has been written about the “hidden curriculum”, meaning the unarticulated rules that are communicated in a learning environment (Margolis, 2001, pp. 17-18). Through the presence of subtle and non-formal norms and practices, often serving to privilege those who are tacitly aware of them, these hidden “rules” effectively exclude anyone unable to “read between the lines” or pick up the non-verbal or non-explicit cues. I argue that the covert, hidden or implicit curriculum is a powerful means of social reproduction in educational settings. The additional difficulty, for many South African students, of speaking a mother tongue that is not that of their lecturers, or the language of instruction at university, heightens the opportunities for the hidden curriculum to reinforce their exclusion from the tacit “rules of the game.” This was an issue regarded as a matter of concern by the Ministerial Commission on Transformation:
transformation involves the informal ‘climate’ of the university – the ways in which people relate to one another on a day-to-day basis.…(T)he informal climate includes both inter-personal relationships and “less tangible, but equally important aspects of transformation, as well as the traditions, symbols and customs of daily interaction which combined constitute institutional culture” In short, the latter refers to ‘the way in which we do things’, as well as to the underlying assumptions and beliefs that underpin this. (p. 35).
In my opinion, these different manifestations of the meanings attaching to curriculum underscore the complexity of interpreting the term in a one-dimensional way. This theme of the various meanings attributed to the term “curriculum” will be extended in the next section, where a range of factors are shown to affect curriculum development.
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