Explicit Curriculum Research Articles

Foolish Dreams in a Fabled Land: Living Co‐Existence in an Israeli Arab School

This article presents the results of an ethnographic case study of an Israeli Arab middle school whose staff and students are Arab Israelis from the Moslem, Druze, and Christian population sectors. Against the Israeli backdrop of multiculturalism, political tensions, and terrorism, this school has created a multi‐faceted curriculum for teaching students the values of non‐violence and peaceful co‐existence, as well as creating a school culture that supports this curriculum. In essence, the explicit curriculum and implicit elements of the school culture together form a highly effective program for teaching non‐violence. The elements of this program are identified as the integration of values education across the curriculum; immediate application of non‐violent problem solving in any situation of conflict between students; the expectation that staff and students will not engage in gossip or slander against one another; staff speaking openly with students about difficult issues such as suicide bombings, and engaging them in thinking about the terrible consequences of violence; ongoing professional development for teachers in relevant areas; and strong, visionary leadership by the school's principal. The principal's status as a Druze in Israel is characterized through Collins' “outsider within” conceptualization, and this status, together with a dramatic incident of violence in the town, are seen as key factors motivating and animating the school's program. The author reflects on the complexities of insider‐outsider status in regard to the school principal and to her own status as a Canadian, Jewish immigrant to Israel, researching an Israeli Arab school.

Thinking about the SHO curriculum

This discussion of the reform of senior house officer (SHO) training draws on important evidence from the evaluation of a pilot curriculum for basic surgical education. Variations and anomalies in SHO teaching and learning were detected, many related to the service context. They highlight the need for explicit curriculum frameworks that build on, and are consonant with, current best practice in SHO education.

Mining the Archive: Evaluating and Improving a Course

This classroom note demonstrates that a course may be improved by paying specific attention to Elliot Eisner’s distinction between a course’s explicit, implicit and null criteria. In an attempt to ground and identify those notoriously slippery curricula, this paper appropriates French philosopher Michel Foucault’s concepts of practice, discourse and archival research. Having explored Foucault’s understanding of these concepts, the paper analyses the course Communication and Processes within Groups at two distinctive phases in its twenty–year history. The resulting excavation of the course’s implicit and null curricula twenty years apart shows that two different sets of facilitators teaching the same explicit curriculum to a very different student body, in vastly changed venues, are working out of two different understandings of what competence in the practice of ministry entails, two very different ministerial education discourses. This paper demonstrates that with students’ questions, a teacher’s intentional probing and Foucault’s framework in hand, it is possible to access and articulate a course’s hidden curricula. In such ways, the practice of mining the archive offers an imaginative way of both evaluating and improving a course that has been taught for many years.

Promoting awareness of sounds in speech: An initial report of an early intervention program for children with speech and language impairments

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the efficacy of the rhyming portion of the Promoting Awareness of Sounds in Speech (PASS) program, a comprehensive and explicit phonological awareness intervention curriculum that was designed specifically for preschool children with speech and language impairments. A single-subject research design was used to examine treatment effects among children with varying levels of communicative competence, to permit flexibility while piloting the intervention program, and to provide experimental control. The PASS rhyming module was implemented with eight children with speech and/or language impairments, following the establishment of a stable pretreatment baseline on a series of phonological awareness probes. After instruction, all of the children demonstrated substantial improvement in their rhyming ability, which generally appeared to be attributable to the intervention rather than environmental or maturational factors. These findings suggest that PASS rhyming training was an effective approach to phonological awareness instruction for the preschoolers with disabilities who comprised our sample. Thus, it appears that explicit instruction in phonological awareness skills is beneficial for children at a point earlier than is typically judged to be therapeutically appropriate.

The structure and content of the medical subinternship: a national survey.

To describe the educational and administrative structure and content of internal medicine subinternship (SI) programs at medical schools throughout the United States. A cross-sectional mailed survey of internal medicine SI directors at U.S. medical schools. Responses were received from 100 (80%) of 125 eligible programs. Seventy-five percent of schools require a SI for graduation; 26% of these schools require the completion of a medical SI. Nationally, about 75% of all medical students opt to complete a medical SI. Dedicated SI administrative committees exist at 46% of medical schools. A minority of programs provide students with explicit curricula (31%) or exclusive conference time (36%). In 44% of programs, subinterns are used by hospital departments of medicine as intern substitutes. Subinterns are responsible for sign-out and cross-coverage in about half of the programs, and all patient orders entered by subinterns require cosignature. Subintern evaluation criteria include attending evaluation (100%), resident evaluation (80%), case write-ups (27%), supervised clinical examination (20%), written examination (14%), and oral examination (3%). Although most medical schools offer an SI in internal medicine and many require it, the experience often lacks clearly defined curricular goals and often does not provide medical students with house-staff-level responsibilities. In an effort to ease the transition from undergraduate to postgraduate training, further studies are needed to define which educational and structural components of the medicine SI should be developed and emphasized.

On the opening of society: towards a more open and flexible educational systema

AbstractThe concept of an open society is based on the idea that even with imperfect information and knowledge people can still act. We find this preferable to the more common presumption that leaders have special access to the truth and thus should lead. We instead look to the history of science to remind ourselves that, since no one is in possession of the actual truth, it seems better to at least distribute responsibility along with information so individuals can seek their own truths. Standing in the way of this are long‐standing traditions, such as the very important one found in higher education. This tradition is where the faculty, administration and accreditation authorities design curriculum structures for students and create learning environments for universities with a presumption that there is truth, that they know what it is, and that it is sufficiently fixed to be institutionalized. This idea of truth supports and exists within a relatively closed system, and assumes that the actors can also behave as if they are closed. Unfortunately, those that design and administer a university have the most to gain if they can keep the system fixed and closed, and those who are excluded from the management are those with the most to lose if the current managers are wrong. The current system operates with impunity. The administrative emphasis can be on finding and following educational standards that presume stability, not in creating learning environments that can accommodate change. This is consistent with the long‐accepted theory that there is a ‘hidden curriculum’ behind the explicit curriculum in higher education. It is set up to give strong messages about power, authority, control, obedience, hierarchy and related behaviors.Herein we are concerned with how this reflects upon our current and future society, and how we might experiment with alternative educational systems that can perform better. Within the pessimism there are significant opportunities for creative improvement, but to realize such innovation educational systems need to be able to enhance cooperation and realignment between different disciplines and stakeholders. It is widely accepted that a flexible, customized curriculum that can be dynamic and accept decision‐making involvement by students is desirable. Generally it gets rejected as being too expensive, requiring too much administration and ‘being unfair to students’. The tendency is to stay with the tradition of ‘standardized and controlled’ education. Major organizational changes will be needed within the formal university to be able to address alternative agendas. Accreditation activities could be instrumental in setting the stage for these. They could address the limits in maintaining barriers between various stakeholders, and impediments for change, the ignoring of quality management and the distress of those who have the most to lose from participation in a defective educational system. Accreditation activities should, on the other hand, foster and enhance developmental improvement in higher education. In this light, the paper proposes two models of educational systems with empirical examples from the Finnish higher education system. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Vanquishing virtue: the impact of medical education.

North American physicians emerge from their medical training with a wide array of professional beliefs and values. Many are thoughtful and introspective. Many are devoted to patients' welfare. Some bring to their work a broad view of social responsibility. Nonetheless, the authors contend that North American medical education favors an explicit commitment to traditional values of doctoring-empathy, compassion, and altruism among them-and a tacit commitment to behaviors grounded in an ethic of detachment, self-interest, and objectivity. They further note that medical students and young physicians respond to this conflict in various ways. Some re-conceptualize themselves primarily as technicians and narrow their professional identities to an ethic of competence, thus adopting the tacit values and discarding the explicit professionalism. Others develop non-reflective professionalism, an implicit avowal that they best care for their patients by treating them as objects of technical services (medical care). Another group appears to be "immunized" against the tacit values, and thus they internalize and develop professional virtue. Certain personal characteristics of the student, such as gender, belief system, and non-medical commitments, probably play roles in "immunization," as do medical school features such as family medicine, communication skills courses, medical ethics, humanities, and social issues in medicine. To be effective, though, these features must be prominent and tightly integrated into the medical school curriculum. The locus of change in the culture of medicine has now shifted to ambulatory settings and the marketplace. It remains to be seen whether this move will lessen the disjunction between the explicit curriculum and the manifestly contradictory values of detachment and entitlement, and the belief that the patient's interest always coincides with the physician's interest.

From the primary care organizations consortium's proposal to the Interdisciplinary Generalist Curriculum Project.

The Interdisciplinary Generalist Curriculum (IGC) Project was one element of an overall federal government strategy designed to promote primary care education. This project, undertaken by the Division of Medicine and Dentistry (DMD), Bureau of Health Professions, Health Resources and Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was the first large-scale medical education contract initiated by DMD. The IGC Project was based on a model proposed by the Primary Care Organizations Consortium (PCOC). The PCOC thesis was that "if students are to decide to pursue a generalist career they must have the opportunity to be taught by generalists." The PCOC Program required an explicit curriculum focusing on generalist knowledge and skills with an emphasis on technology, in the context of education that required training in ambulatory office-based settings. The PCOC Program specified that responsibility for the program's planning, implementation, and evaluation be shared by the three generalist physician faculties of family medicine, general internal medicine, and general pediatrics. In implementation of this demonstration project in ten medical schools across the nation, several lessons have been learned relative to enhancement of generalist education. Among these lessons is that seed money targeted to initiate modest change can act as a catalyst and improve the knowledge and skills afforded medical students concerning generalist practice. Limited funds provided over a sufficient period of time can induce schools to undertake significant curricular change.

(En)Gendering Multicultural Identities and Representations in Education

This article examines the place of women of the world in the implicit and explicit social studies curriculum of the schools. The authors establish a postcolonial feminist framework for dealing with this topic and draw on evidence from personal testimonies of immigrant and native women, the treatment of women of the “third world” by mainstream media, social studies curriculum standards, and one classroom teacher's story. Central to the article is an examination of the tension teachers face in dealing with issues of gender cross-culturally as they navigate between ethnocentrism and cultural relativism towards what is called “the middle ground.” The authors offer suggestions at the end of the article for incorporating material about women of the world into the social studies curriculum from a postcolonial feminist perspective.

The Promotion of Reflective Practice in European Teacher Education: conceptions, purposes and actions

An investigation Into the conceptualisation and use of reflective practice in Initial (ITE) and In-service teacher education INSET) organisations in Europe revealed a complex and wide ranging pattern of responses. Despite this there were many points of contact in evidence, Including similarities in methods of teaching, the lack of a generic and explicit curriculum for reflective practice and the tendency towards a more formal approach in INSET as opposed to ITE. in addition countries outside the United Kingdom would appear to be much less Inhibited in the promotion of reflective practice as a ‘liberating’ force in ITE. However, the overall conclusion to the Investigation recognises the strong basis already in existence for furthering the promotion of reflective practice throughout Europe in both Initial teacher education and the continuing professional development of teachers.

Getting the ‘Right Answers’: student evaluation as a reflection of intellectual development?

Student evaluations of teaching constitute a recurring theme for debate within the tertiary education literature particularly in relation to validity and reliability. My aim in this paper is to highlight the dependence of student evaluative capabilities on their own beliefs and assumptions about knowledge constituting ‘ways of knowing’, which will differ from one student to the next, and to advocate that this is taken into account when evaluations of teaching are analysed and interpreted. I begin by addressing the nature of the student evaluation process, its current perceived status in higher education and in relation to student expectations in the present consumerist culture from which universities are not exempt. I then go on to focus on cognitive development implicit in higher education, and consider its impact on student expectations and consequent evaluations. Finally, I suggest that promoting an understanding of changing and developing epistemic assumptions of students should be an essential component of the explicit curriculum to the benefit of both students and lecturing staff, and recommend the exploration of more qualitative approaches to student evaluation.

Current Developments in Language Curriculum Design: An Australian Perspective

The past decade in language curriculum in Australia has been a time of exploration and innovation, and also a time of consolidation. During this period, curriculum planning reflected, first, a swing within the teaching profession to greater teacher responsibility in curriculum (a responsive curriculum), then a swing back to teacher accountability (an explicit curriculum) due to demands external to the teaching profession. In addition, language curriculum in Australia was strongly influenced by communicative language teaching theory (CLT) and the related developments of task-based learning (TBL), needs-based programming, and language as discourse theory.

Transformation and Outcomes-Based Education in South Africa: Opportunities and Challenges

The difficulties of reconstruction and social renewal, as citizens of the Republic of South Africa are learning in their new democracy, are great and demand levels of commitment that challenge deep-seated and entrenched sensibilities about the nature of the world and its organization. During apartheid, education was used not only to achieve social separation but, insofar as it was built around a social philosophy, it was also the legitimating arena for White supremacy and for the complex system of racial and cultural ordering that evolved around it. Within the old order's traditional educational institutions, the hidden and explicit curricula were configured to produce, reproduce, and validate racial separation and hierarchy. Presumptions of European superiority and African inferiority within this canon were commonplace-indeed, they were established as modern truths about human progress and development. These truths provided the ideological foundations upon which apartheid education was built. According to Lotz (1996), within South African schools,

Curriculum knowledge representation and manipulation in knowledge-based tutoring systems

A knowledge-based tutoring system (KBTS) is a computer-based instructional system that uses artificial intelligence techniques to help people learn some subjects. We found that the knowledge communication process involving a KBTS and a human student can be decomposed into a series of communication cycles, where each cycle concentrates on one topic and contains four major phases: planning, discussing, evaluating and remedying. The major contributions of this work are the development of a generic architecture for supporting the knowledge communication between a KBTS and a student, and a graphical notation and schema for supporting the curriculum knowledge representation and manipulation during the planning phase of a tutoring process. The curriculum knowledge about a course can help a tutoring system determine the sequences in which the topics will be discussed with the students effectively and diagnose the students' mistakes. The curriculum knowledge base contains the goal structure of the course, prerequisite relations, and multiple ways of organizing topics, among others. As an example, we focus on developing SQL-TUTOR, a KBTS for the domain of SQL programming. This system has features such as an efficient control mechanism, explicit curriculum knowledge representation, and individualized private tutoring. For allowing the students relative freedom to decide how to study the domain knowledge about a subject, the system provides the students with a group of operators to hand-tailor the learning schedules according to their special backgrounds, requests, and interests.

Evaluating the Statewide Dissemination of Smoking Prevention Curricula: Factors in Teacher Compliance

As part of a larger study to evaluate the impact of a state-levied tax increase on tobacco products and the allocation of funds for smoking education, 81 schools were assigned randomly to one of four recommended smoking prevention programs for adolescents. The four programs differed in amount of program structure and extent of teacher training required. A one-session observation was made of 106 teachers in the 81 schools to assess the percentage of time allocated to recommended activities--those based on the social influences model. Data suggest an explicit curriculum with designed activities and face-to-face teacher training results in greater compliance to prescribed program components.