1. Developing, Using and Organising
Resources Within a Specialist Area
Unit 506
L5 Diploma in Education and Training
2. Inclusive Curriculum Design
• What is curriculum design?
• How does this impact on the
resources you create and use?
• How can we ensure that we include
(and not exclude) everyone? Let’s
start with the Learning Cycle…
7. Assess
Have the students learned
what you intended them
to learn?
Formal and/or
informal assessment.
Ongoing and at the end.
8. Evaluate
What is your and
your learners’ opinion
of the session, resource
or course?
How could it be made
better next time?
9. Thinking Point
• What Are the Other Sources that Inform Our
Curriculum Design?
– Qualification standards
– Course specifications
– Anything else????
10. Inclusive Curriculum - Theory
John Kerr defines Curriculum as, “All the learning
which is planned and guided by the [college], whether
it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or
outside the [college]”. See Kelly, A. V. (1983; 1999) The
Curriculum. Theory and practice 4e, London: Paul
Chapman.
Thus we have to specify in advance what we are
seeking to achieve and how we are to go about it.
11. It is helpful to approach curriculum theory and practice
in the light of Aristotle’s influential categorization of
knowledge into three disciplines: the theoretical, the
productive and the practical…
Aristotle (1976) The Nicomachean Ethics (‘Ethics’), Harmondsworth: Penguin.
13. Curriculum as a Product
• It used to be that there were certain skills to master and
facts to know.
• Knowledge was seen as something similar to a product that
is manufactured. Generally, one starts knowing nothing, is
taught, and one transmits that knowledge to action. For the
most part, this point of view worked for quite some time,
as it organized learning quite neatly.
• The problem is that students are generally left out of the
picture.
• The product model, by having a pre-specified plan or
program, tends to direct attention to teaching.
• For example, the focus is on: how the information is given.
14. Curriculum as a Process
• The learners in this model have a clear voice in the way that
the sessions evolve. The focus is on interactions and the
attention shifts from teaching to learning.
• Curriculum as a process is what actually happens in the
classroom and what people do to prepare and evaluate.
• Stenhouse (1975) produced one of the best-known
explorations of a process model of curriculum theory and
practice.
• He suggests that a curriculum is rather like a recipe in cookery.
A curriculum, like the recipe for a dish, is first imagined as a
possibility, then the subject of experiment (as the curriculum
itself). Finally, within limits, a recipe can be varied according
to taste - so can a curriculum.
15. Problems?
• The major weakness and, indeed, strength of the process
model is that it rests upon the quality of teachers. If they
are not up to much, then there is no safety net in the
form of prescribed curriculum materials.
• When students are able to demonstrate certain skills,
they are deemed to have completed the process.
• The actions have become the ends; the processes have
become the product.
• Whether or not students are able to apply the skills to
make sense of the world around them is somehow
overlooked.
16. Curriculum as a Praxis
• This notion holds that teaching practice should not focus
exclusively on individuals alone or the group alone.
Instead, it pays careful attention to the way in which
individuals and the group create understandings and
practices, as well as meaning.
• e.g. in sessions that seek to explore the experiences of
different cultural and racial groups in society (i.e. in a
tutorial challenging stereotypes), the teacher could look
to see whether the direction of the work took students
beyond focusing on individual attitudes. Are the students
confronting the materials and lesson through which their
attitudes are constituted, for example?
17. Grundy (1987)
• ‘That is, the curriculum is not simply a set
of plans to be implemented, but rather is
constituted through an active process in
which planning, acting and evaluating are
all reciprocally related and integrated into
the process’
• At its centre is praxis: informed, committed
action.
18. Curriculum as a Context
• The curriculum is contextually shaped, based on the
social relationships of the college - the nature of the
teacher-student relationship, the organization of classes,
tracking, and so on. These elements are sometimes
known as the hidden curriculum.
• By paying attention to the social context, we learn about
how important the spaces between lessons really is; we
can begin to get a better grasp of the impact of structural
and socio-cultural process on teachers and students.
• Economics, social structure, family dynamics, power
struggles, and the rest contribute to the learning process.
19. Session’s challenges for all were to….
• Explain the purpose and use of resources in our own
specialist areas (ref 1.1)
19
For some were to….
• Analyse the principles of resource design (2.1)
• Analyse and Evaluate the sources, theories principles
and models of inclusive curriculum that influence
resource design (2.2, 2.3)
• Evaluate the effectiveness of our resources in meeting
individual learning needs, and ways in which resources
can be adapted to meet these needs (1.2, 2.4)
