سازماندهی تغییر برنامه تحصیلی (OCC)

ABSTRACT Organizing curriculum change: an introduction

Authoritative documents issued by national, state and/or provincial ministries, boards, or councils of education that aim to govern the content and aims and, often, forms of teaching of their teachers and schools are increasingly omnipresent in national or provincial school systems. Such documents can present in comprehensive volumes curriculum frameworks for all subject areas at a school level and/or school type or they can be organized as subject syllabi, covering single subject areas in school types or levels. They can be supported by additional documents giving local educational authorities (lEAs), other school owners, schools, and teachers ‘guidance’.1 Table 1 lists the many documents that the Canadian province of Nova Scotia has developed to direct curricula and teaching in its schools. Such documents, developed by national, and/or state, provincial or cantonal departments and boards of education, are at the heart of the work of educational leadership of governments and their ministries of education (see International Bureau of Education, 2001). But how should we think about such documents? How should we think about the work of state-based curriculum-making that underlies them? Formal curriculum documents of the kind illustrated in Table 1 are the outcomes of the work of ministers, ministries, boards and departments of education and, in some jurisdictions, legislatures and their committees. But they are also the work of civil servants and representatives of the communities of practice in schools and colleges. They present authoritative mandates and/or entitlements. They outline how the educational work of a system of schools should be described, categorized, and sequenced in terms of ‘subject’ categories and descriptors; what content should be taught to (different) classes of students at the various grade levels; (often) how teaching should be undertaken, i.e. the timetable; and they (typically) outline the social, educational and pedagogical rationales underlying the curriculum or syllabus (see Tables 2 and 3). They may include examples of ‘best practices’ as a way of ‘educating’ teachers and schools in the forms of teaching and instruction that the curriculum-makers envisage. They may specify in some detail the ‘content’, the topics and themes (and at times the individual authors, works of literature, scientific laws, etc.) that teachers will treat (see Table 4); or they may outline competence or learning ‘standards’, expectations for the outcomes of learning without a precise specification of the teaching ‘content’ (see Table 5). They may be highly prescriptive, or they may present frameworks, outlines to be developed by local education agencies and/or individual schools and teachers. They may exert their influence by way of curriculum documents developed and issued by lEAs and/or school owners or they may address teachers directly. New curricula may be episodic, occuring every 10 or so years, or they maybe—as is increasingly the case—in an almost permanent flux (see Table 6).

In other words, the character and nature of the mandates set out in state-based curricula can, and do, differ within and across jurisdictions – and across time periods. But where it is practised, it has within its purview many important decisions about what schools do and how they are organized. For example,

• that the time in students’ schedules that should be made available for locally developed activities and units; that the time that had been available for such activities be restricted or modified;

• that English as an international language will be taught to all students beginning in, e.g. grade 4; that, e.g. Mandarin, Hindi and/or Japanese rather than, e.g. French or Spanish will the first foreign language taught in secondary schools;

• that an integrated ‘social studies’ or ‘science and society’ rather than distinct courses in history, geography, chemistry, biology, etc.

will be the vehicles for civic and environmental education; that religious education be moved beyond a Christian perspective;2

that courses in national history in settler societies become vehicles for teaching the history of the nation’s indigenous or immigrant peoples as well the histories of the settlers.

In addition to specifying the scope and sequence of graded subjects or areas of study, curriculum documents set out the structures of courses and course sequences (and their creditability) to be available within school systems. When curriculum documents are set alongside a system’s policies, rules and practices relating to the distribution of forms of schooling and the evaluative rules that define expectations for ‘successful’/’unsuccessful’ students, curricula constitute one of the principal instruments potentially available to states both for the governance of inner work of the school and for the legitimation of their educational systems (see Bähr et al., 2000; lundgren, 2003).