Examples of Recent Thinking in Higher Education

An article by Knight (2001) provides a convincing argument for the superiority of a process approach to curriculum development in higher education by outlining the problems with an “outcomes-led rational approach” to curriculum planning. Knight’s major point, however, is not to advocate one approach over another, but to stress the necessity of coherence in a curriculum. He returns to Jerome Bruner’s concept of the spiral curriculum, saying “Bruner depicted good curriculum as a spiral of repeated engagements to improve and deepen skills, concepts, attitudes and values, and extend their reach. The spiral curriculum has coherence, progression and, I claim, value” (p. 371). Contending that it is possible to provide coherence and progression in a process curriculum as well as in a product curriculum, he writes, “a good curriculum would plan for learning to take place through communities of practice in which group work and peer evaluation are normal, interpersonal contact is common and networks of engagement are extensive” (p. 377). Other curriculum writers, particularly those from the UK, have gone beyond thinking of curriculum as product or process or the more recent extensions of those theories. Barnett, Parry, and Coate (2001) propose a model of curriculum that involves three domains: knowledge, action, and self. The knowledge component is comprised of discipline-specific subject matter; the action component includes the necessary skills of the discipline; and the self component includes identifying oneself with the competencies of the discipline. The authors give an example of a history major. For him or her, the knowledge domain would be the history specialty area, the action domain would include skills such as critical writing; the self domain would include a view of self as critical evaluator. They contend that the way the three domains are weighted and integrated differs depending on the subject matter and that curriculum development should take those different integration patterns into account. Jan Parker (2003) argues for a “transformational curriculum.” Suggesting that the Barnett, et al. model be expanded and concentrate on the interaction of the three domains, Parker says that students should design their own interacting aspects of knowledge, action, and self. Such a curriculum “would engage the student’s love of knowledge, and use that to re-inspire the teacher’s, would develop a mature critical self, which was nevertheless sophisticatedly appreciative, would incorporate the Barnett value of dealing with supercomplex paradigms and value systems while understanding how and why to invest oneself” (p. 542). This approach to curriculum centers on metacognition and self-direction, and as the author says, transformation.