Curriculum Development Methods Research Articles

Democratic Concept Development: A Dialogic Process for Developing Education Curriculum

Curriculum is a mechanism for citizenship preparation. Although a large body of literature speaks to the important role of official and hidden curriculum in fostering or hindering democratic classrooms, much less attention has been given to the processes of curriculum development, especially between Western researchers and teachers in postcolonial African contexts. This article discusses a curriculum development method, namely, Democratic Concept Development (DCD), created by 2 American social educators (Kubow & Fischer) in their work with groups of South African and Kenyan teachers during an international project. The methodology—premised on 4 critical social aims (namely, dialogue, consciousness raising, change, and transformation)—provides a way to make public teachers' views of democracy. For those who view the means (democratic processes) to be just as important as the ends (democratic lessons), DCD represents a pedagogical process for developing citizenship education curriculum.

Participatory curriculum development: Lessons drawn from teaching environmental education to industry in Zimbabwe

My experience of teaching the Rhodes University/Speciss College Environmental Education Course in Zimbabwe alerted me to a tension between the industry course participants who largely (although not entirely) wanted a skills/vocational training orientation and the course curriculum developers, who wanted a critical/theoretical/praxis-based orientation to the course. This paper is an attempt to offer some resolution of the dilemma this provided the course developers. I begin by briefly describing the tension historically and internationally and giving an outline of Fairclough's (1999) position in its regard. I then suggest that a conventionalist interpretation of the participatory/contextualist method of curriculum development should be avoided, arguing that conventionalism is covertly anti-epistemological in that it leads to the thesis that epistemic standards do not rest on truth/validity claims but on convention (Haack, 1993, p. 20). Thus contextualisation, interpreted as conventionalism, becomes inherently conservative. Instead I suggest an approach to curriculum development based on Haack's (1993, p. 73) explicandum of epistemic justification: 'A is more/less justified, at time t, in believing that p, depending on …'. Thus, if there is good enough (note: not absolute) evidence to disagree with the community's construction of what the best curriculum should be, provided we can demonstrate our disagreement with intellectual integrity, then it is appropriate to go against the grain of the majority of the community's construction of its curriculum needs (in this case, the call for skills-based training), and instead attend to the requirements of a minority of the community.

Continuing engineering education for employees at Hitachi Institute of Technology

The concepts underlying education at the Hitachi Institute of Technology (HIT), the course structures, and the methods of curriculum development and evaluation are described. An example of a state-of-the-art Japanese corporation continuing engineering education is provided. HIT dedicates itself to the overall advancement of the company's engineering prowess by using the highest level of engineering education. It offers the integrated engineering development program (IED), and the specialized engineering development program (SED). The software engineering education project of the whole company is also described. >

Public Relations and Curriculum Development

Different theories and methods of curriculum development require quite different approaches to public relations. For the school curriculum de veloped by experts, the public relations job is primarily one of gaining acceptance and support from the non-expert public which includes parents, non-parents, students, and teachers. The appropriate techniques are those described in the literature of public relations, school interpretation, and school publicity. For the school curriculum developed by cooperative effort of all those (including parents, non-parents, students, and educators) who have a stake in the better education of boys and girls, the term public relations takes on added meaning. In this meaning, giving information to the many publics is important, but the fundamental concern of public relations centers in bring ing about the sort of relationships between the many publics that will best contribute to the development of children. In this view, the educational interests of children cannot be properly served unless the broad resources of community life, enterprise, and personnel are drawn into the planning, execution, and evaluation of the curriculum. These two approaches to curriculum development may help bring into focus the issues involved in setting up and carrying out a public relations program.