What did I learn from the presentation on curriculum (VS1)?

The topic of curriculum was very interesting as I have never received teaching about this subject before. The most interesting part of the presentation by Saturn was the four approaches to curriculum, which are:

1. curriculum as a body of knowledge to be transmitted

2. product

3. process

4. praxis 

(Marsh, C. J. & Willis, G. (2003). Curriculum: Alternative approaches, ongoing issues. (3^rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall)

The first one, representing the curriculum as a body of knowledge is the traditional view. This is how it was carried out during my years of study. Mostly our studies were practical and we did not have to read a lot of books, like our fellow teachers-to-be – they had to read about 1,000 pages per exam whereas we had to read less than 10 books during 6 years of university. Anyway, on our few lecture courses we were busy copying the notes of the professor from the overhead projector to our notes. And during the exams we did the opposite: quoted the lecture notes as answers to essay questions. I don't think I can recall much of the information I learned. If the same principle applies to curriculum, I doubt this teacher- or information-based learning is beneficial for anyone, rather a waste of time.

I learned that curriculum can also be seen as a product. Now the first association to be is productizing, service design, utility design... and exporting education, as the Finnish universities of applied science are designing education training packages to Chinese nurses and so forth. Let's see what this means. The definition goes: “Education is seen as technical exercise and the results are measured.” There could be a danger here that the students are only seen as recipients of information or the theatre performed by the teachers, not as individual with their specific talents, interests, and learning needs. In other words, this is teacher- or maybe content-based learning focuses on the subject matter and assessment methods, not on students as learners.

Third, curriculum can be treated as process (and this already sounds much better to me). This model is more flexible, as it allow the teachers to evaluate the process and to make the necessary adjustments. It offers principles of choosing the content, to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of individual students. I think this model is best applicable in small groups, where the teachers knows all students quite well. On mass lectures there is no benefit from it.

Fourth, the curriculum can ben see as praxis, i.e. something applied into practice. The praxis model combines theoretical information into real-life practice, and I can see how there are limitation to this, too. For example, this may not work very well in linguistics, but in nursing this model could be beneficial.

I can see that the obvious benefit of a fixed curriculum is that there is a clear frame of reference. Thus everyone will yield the same learning goals, so the level of teaching is maintained stable. If we move towards a student-focused teaching in the information society, the teacher needs to take their students special qualities into consideration, if not in curriculum, in the subject matter, carrying out the exercises or the evaluation. As a summary I comment that this presentation opened my eyes to see the different aspects of curriculum and what factors there are behind it. I feel somewhat competent of creating curriculums for my future students, regarding the subject and the outline of what I will be teaching.