Five Conceptions of Curriculum

910 Words4 Pages
Five conceptions of curriculum: their roots and implications for curriculum planning - Eisner begins by explaining how Curricula and curricular mandates are considered carefully and are widely taken to be important to interest groups, governments, school districts and their staffs. - They spend much time and effort into debating and discussing about the curriculum. He claims it to be very important to direct the work of schooling and also for educational discourse and policymaking because they give much influence to the students’ education. - there are conflicts in the curriculum because they are only based on the form and content of curriculum and the goals toward which schools should strive. All curricula emerge from ideas about what should be taught and learned, and how such teaching and learning might best be undertaken and then certified Questions like “ What knowledge is of most worth” are asked behind the prescription and development of all curricula- because it is the knowledge that is of most worth that education should, seemingly, reflect. Questions like “ What can and should be taught to whom, when and how” are persistently asked in the curriculum field. Eisner says that the way these questions are answered is influenced largely by the assumptions through which they are approached in the first place. These assumptions define the five classical curriculum “ conceptions” which are 1. curriculum as the development of cognitive processes 2. curriculum as technology 3. curriculum as self- actualization or consumatory experience 4. curriculum for social learning 5. curriculum for academic rationalization The classification of these different conceptions of education and educating has been one of the core approaches used to gie both teachers and laypeople a framework for approaching the normative issues that circle
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