Creative curriculum design in a time of

constraint

Tansy JessopSLTI Workshop

Solent Sports’ Courses5 April 2017

What you want out of this session

• Jot down one or two things you hope to get out of this session

• Chat to your table group and come up with a brief shared list on flipchart paper

• Stick it up on the wall.

This is what I thought I’d do…

• What is curriculum design?

• What about assessment?

• What educational principles are vital in good curriculum design?

Three premises

• ‘Positive restlessness’: success is never final

•Money is not everything

• Control the things we have the power to control

Commit to paper: your definition of curriculum

• Write a short definition of what you think curriculum is - your idea of curriculum; based on your experience as a teacher, learner, observer.

• Chat to your neighbour about your thoughts

Curriculum (n) running, chariot, course

Curriculum paradigmsPRODUCT: structuring and managing content (WHAT)

PROCESS: the lived experience (HOW)

PRAXIS: wider purpose of HE, social justice, equality (WHY)

Three problems with HE curriculum design

Problem 1: Focus on content

The curriculum is a handy container for content

Problem 2: Restrictions are overplayed

Problem 3: Wider picture missing

Approaches to curriculum design

1) Rational Curriculum Planning (Tyler 1949)

2) Bruner’s Spiral Curriculum (1960)

3) Curriculum as planned process (Stenhouse 1975)

4) Constructive Alignment (Biggs 1999; 2003)

5) Curriculum as ‘being’ in the world (Barnett and Coate, 2005)

6) Curriculum as social process: Pinar (2011); Blackmore and Kandiko (2014

Paradigm What it looks like

Technical rational Focus on data and tools

Relational Focus on people

Emancipatory Focus on systems and structures

Bruner’s Spiral Curriculum(1) The student revisits a

topic, theme or subject

(2) The complexity of the topic or theme increases with each revisit

(3) New learning has a relationship with old learning and is put in context with the old information.

There can be no curriculum development without teacher development

(Stenhouse 1975)

Outcomes-based education

Learning outcomes mark the move from teacher-directed to student-centred learning

(Brooks et al. 2014).

Dominant discourse in HE. Argued that it puts the emphasis on the student.

From our students’ point of view, assessment always defines the curriculum (Ramsden 1992).

How shall we assess the students to reap the learning and development our discipline requires and we see as

important?

What do we see as important?

Your ideal graduate

Choose your top three attributes.

Go to www.menti.com and use the code 76 59 46

Main outcomes for a graduate of my course

University of Sydney’s simple generic graduate attributes

1. Scholarship: An attitude or stance towards knowledge

2. Global citizenship: An attitude or stance towards the world

3. Lifelong learning: An attitude or stance towards themselves

(Barrie 2004)

A new model (Barnett and Coate 2005)

• Knowing is about content• Acting is about becoming a

historian, actor, psychologist, or philosopher• Being is about

understanding yourself, orienting yourself and relating your knowledge and action to the world

Knowing

Being

Acting

Reframing Barnett

• What is about content• How is about becoming a

historian, actor, psychologist, or philosopher• Why is about

understanding yourself, orienting yourself and relating your knowledge and action to the world

What

Why

How

Curriculum as ‘complicated conversation’ (Pinar 2011)

Social practice fosters opportunities for students and lecturers to recognise… its tacit articulation of particular values and power relations

Academic coherence emerges out of a shared awareness of the curriculum as a socially constructed experience between student, lecturer, and a disciplinary tradition.

Blackmore and Kandiko 2012

Take two

1. Which of these curriculum approaches has any resonance for you?

2. What about it makes sense?

3. Why?

Educational principles • Help students to see connections across units• Challenge students and set high expectations• Less is more: sacrifice content for depth and active

engagement• Students need ‘time on task’ • Be both contemporary and classical • Provide students with choices to make learning

meaningful to them• Teaching is messy and relational – don’t get hung up

on the technical apparatus

ReferencesBarnett, R. and Coate, K. 2005. Engaging the Curriculum in Higher Education. Maidenhead. Open University Press.Barrie, S. 2004. A research based approach to generic ‐graduate attributes policy, Higher Education Research & Development, 23:3, 261-275Biggs, J. and Tang, C. 1999. Teaching for Quality Learning at University. Maidenhead. Open University Press.Collini, S. 2012. What are universities for? Penguin.Felten. P. et al. The Undergraduate Experience. Jossey-Bass.Pinar, W. 2011. What is Curriculum Theory? Routledge.