Towards a Stronger Teacher Role in Curriculum Development

Abstract

20 Curriculum development requires the fusion of a variety of different kinds of expertise, coming from current experience in the classroom and from study of relevant problems in a wider context. The view expressed in this paper is that the expertise of practising teachers has a crucial role in curriculum development, if questions of central concern to teachers are to be tackled and answers of a practicable nature suggested. Furthermore in my experience teachers have the knowledge and sensitivity to make this important contribution though many factors often combine to prevent them doing so. In the first part of the paper I attempt to examine the meaning of teacher participation in order to explore the extent to which the expertise of teachers has made a genuine contribution to recent curricular innovations in practice, to look at both the constraints which restrict this contribution and the circumstances which support it. Two aspects of teacher participation are distinguished which are considered to be separable, fairly independent of each other and variable along a dimension from weak to strong. The first is described as a research role. It refers to the degree of freedom which teachers have with regard to choosing the areas of enquiry or focus of development. A strong research role implies that teachers have a part in the decision about the questions to be addressed and therefore a greater likelihood that the development relates to problems teachers feel are important rather than those perceived by others. Teachers have a weak research role when the focus of curriculum development is for the most part determined by others. The second aspect is named a development role and refers to teachers' participation in deciding the approaches and solutions to be developed once a particular problem area has been selected. Freedom to explore whatever avenues occur to teachers as likely to be helpful implies a strong development role, whilst being constrained to follow a given line implies a weak development role. The four main combinations of either weak or strong development role with either weak or strong research role are discussed, taking examples mainly from Schools Council and Nuffield projects. For instance the projects of the 60s tended to 'use' teachers for the purpose of giving reactions to trial materials; their comments led to minor changes of detail in products whose aims and nature were beyond the influence of teachers outside the project teams. Thus the teachers involved were allowed only weak research and weak development roles. Large national projects rarely allow teachers a strong research role and most examples of this occur in local projects and in action research. Some recent national projects have given teachers a strong development role, but in combination with a weak research role this still means there is a danger of the work ending up by providing solutions to problems teachers may not have or not feel to be central concerns. The advantage of local initiatives in this respect is therefore a telling point, to be put against the possible disadvantages of small-scale developments carried out on a shoe string budget. Exploring the reasons why national projects do not allow teachers stronger roles inevitably draws criticism to the Schools Council. The processes by which the Council selects and promotes projects, the time-scale of the operation and the expectation of a published material outcome, create circumstances which tend to prevent rather than support the achievement of its declared intention to follow