Curriculum Design and

Organization
CHAPTER 4
 Introduction

 How one contemplates education, curriculum, and curriculum designs and its
organization when it is influenced by countless fields of knowing and feeling.

 It is a fact that people draw from their experiences, their lived histories,
their values, their belief systems, their social interactions, and their
imaginations.

 Educational thinkers and doers must consider diversity.

Sources of Curriculum Design
Curriculum sources – are the viewpoints of curriculum designers towards their
philosophical, social, and political viewpoints for society and the individual learner.

David Ferrero – an American educator, stated that educational action begins with
recognizing one’s beliefs and values, which influence what one considers worth
knowing and teaching.

Ronald Doll – stated the four foundations of curriculum design – science, society,
eternal truths, and divine will.

Dewey and Bode and popularized by Tyler – identified the curriculum sources,
these are: knowledge, society, and the learner partially overlap with one another.
 Science as a Source
Some curriculum leaders depend on the scientific method when designing
curriculum.

They value the observable, quantifiable elements and prioritized problem

solving.

Their designs highlight learning how to learn.

Most of their argument of thinking processes is founded on cognitive psychology.

Most educators believe that curriculum should prioritize the teaching of

thinking strategies.
 Society as a Source
Curriculum designers believe that school is a vehicle for development of society and
stress its curriculum ideas should come from the exploration of the social situation.

They also consider the present and future characteristics of society.

Curriculum designers should not disregard social multiplicity, ethnic groups, and social
classes.

Multiplicity increasingly manifest as the Philippines accepting more foreign students and
immigrant groups coming from the Asian region.

As per Arthur Ellis, no curriculum or curriculum design can be considered or created apart
from the people who make up our evolving society.
 Moral Doctrine as a Source
 The Bible or other religious documents are references of some people who believe that curriculum design
should be based on it.

 This view, was common in our schools during the Spanish period. While today, it has lesser influence in
public school primarily because of the separation of church and state written in our constitution.

 Dwayne Huebner stated that education can address spirituality without bringing in religion.

 As for James Moffett, spirituality fosters mindfulness, attentiveness, awareness of the outside world, and
self-awareness.

 Spiritual curriculum designers ask questions about the nature of the world, the purpose of life, and what
it means to be human and knowledgeable.

 William Pinar remarks that viewing curriculum as religious text may allow for a blending of truth, faith,
knowledge, ethics, thought, and action.
 Knowledge as a Source
According to some, knowledge is the primary source of curriculum

Herbert Spencer positioned knowledge within the framework

curriculum, when he asked, “What knowledge is of most important?”

Placing knowledge at the center of curriculum design recognize that

knowledge is perhaps a discipline, having the specific structure and
methods by which scholars stretch out its boundaries.

A requirement of 180 school days session is still the requirement of

most schools.
 The Learner as a Source
Others consider that curriculum should stem from our knowledge of students: we must
know how they learn, form attitudes, create interests, and develop values.

From progressive curricular leaders, humanistic educators, many curricular workers

involved in postmodern dialogue, the learner should be the primary source of curriculum
change.

Lots of cognitive research has supported curriculum designers with ways to improve
educational activities that aid perceiving, thinking, and learning.

The learner-focused curriculum design highlights student’s knowledge.

Learner-based curriculum design seeks to inspire students and promotes their individual’s
uniqueness.
 Conceptual Framework: Horizontal and
Vertical Organization
1. Horizontal organization – is the arrangement of topics, themes, or courses
offered at the same point in time, and which blends curriculum elements, for
example by combining world history, geography and political science content
to create a “Contemporary World Issues” course or by combining English and
Business Content.

2. Vertical organization - which is the sequencing of curriculum elements.

Ranking “the Philippine History” in grade 7 social studies and “Asian History”
in grade 8 social studies is an example of vertical organization. Often,
curricula are structured so that the same topics are tackled in different
grades, but in increasing items and at increasingly higher level of difficulty.
 Points to Consider When Contemplating
Curriculum Design
Curriculum design reflects the curriculum architecture. Here are some useful points to
consider in “thinking” an effective curriculum design.

• Reflect on your philosophical educational, and curriculum assumptions with regard to the
goals of the school (or a school district)
• Consider your student’s needs and aspirations.
• Consider the various design components and their organization.
• Sketch out the various design components to be implemented.
• Cross check your “selected” design components (objectives, content, learning experiences,
and evaluation approaches) against the school mission.
• Share your curriculum design with a colleague. Source: Adapted from Ornstein and Hunkins 2009,
Curriculum, Foundations, Principles and Issues
Curriculum Design Qualities
 Scope
 Curriculum scope – refers to the breadth and depth of curriculum content – at any level or at any given time.

 Ralph Tyler’s book of In Basic Principles of Curriculum Instruction, it refers to scope as consisting of all the
contents, topics, learning experiences, and organizing threads comprising the educational plan.

 John Goodlad and Zhisin Su reiterated this which refers to the curriculum’s horizontal dimension.

 All the types of educational experiences constructed to involve students in learning are part of the scope.

 A curriculum whose scope covers only months or weeks usually is structured in units.

 Units are divided into lesson plans, which usually structure the information and activities into a period of hours
or minutes. This can continue over a year or more.

 To view the curriculum scope, we must consider the learnings in cognitive, affective, and psychomotor
domains.
 Sequence
Curriculum sequence is concerned with the order of topics
overtime.

With this concern over a period of time, curriculum sequence is

called a vertical dimension.

Piaget’s research provided a framework for sequencing content

and experiences or activities and for connecting expectations to
students’ cognitive levels.

Most schools consider students’ stages of thinking in planning

curriculum objectives, content, and experiences by grade level.
 Sequence (cont.)
Othanel Smith, William Stanby and Harlan Shores in 1973, introduced four
principles, they are:

1. Simple to complex learning – indicates to optimally organize in a sequence preceding from

simple subordinate components to complex highlighting interrelationships among components.

2. Prerequisite learning – is similar to part-to-whole learning. It works on the assumption that

bits of information must be grasped before other bits can be comprehended.

3. Whole-to-part learning – urged that the curriculum be arranged so that the content or
experience is first presented in an overview that provides students with a general idea of the
information or situation.

4. Chronological learning – refers to content whose sequence reflects the times of real world
occurrences.
 Sequence (cont.)
In 1976, Gerald Posner and Kenneth Strike provided the field of curriculum with
four types of sequencing. Their views were:

1. The concept-related method – focuses on concepts’ interrelationships rather than on

knowledge of the concrete.

2. The inquiry-related model – topics are sequenced to reflect the steps of scholarly
investigation. If people fail to use acquired information, they must recognize a failure in
reasoning or a deficiency in knowledge.

3. The learner-related sequence – individuals learn through experiencing content and activities.

4. Utilization-related learning – focuses on how people who use knowledge or engage in a

particular activity in the world that actually proceed through the activity.
 Continuity
Continuity refers to “smoothness” or absence of
disruption in the curriculum over time.

Continuity is mostly manifested in Jerome Bruner’s

notion of the “spiral curriculum”. Bruner cited that the
curriculum should be organized according to the
interrelationships among the basic ideas and structures
of each major discipline.
Continuity (Cont.)
Curriculum 1 Curriculum 2 Curriculum 3
A A A
B B B
C D
D D C
E E E
F F
G G H
H H G
 Integration
Integration is linking all types of knowledge and experiences contained within the
curriculum plan.

The horizontal relationships among topics and themes from all knowledge domains is the
emphasis of integration.

Curriculum integration is not simply a design dimension, but also a way of thinking about
schools’ commitment, curriculum sources, and the nature and uses of knowledge.

In year 1960s, Hilda Taba, cited out that the curriculum was disjointed, fragmented,
segmented, and detached from reality.

The movements like postmodernism, constructionism, and post-structuralism will nurture

continued discussion of curriculum integration.
 Articulation
Articulation refers to the smooth flow of the curriculum on both vertical and
horizontal dimensions, it is the ways in which curriculum components occurring
later in a program’s sequence relate to those occurring earlier.

Vertical articulation usually suggests the sequencing of content from grade level to
another.

Horizontal articulation other called correlation usually is the association among

simultaneous elements, as when curriculum designers create relationships between
eight-grade mathematics and eighth-grade social studies.

Curriculum workers seek to combine contents in one portion of the educational

program with contents similar in rationality or subject matter.
 Balance
In designing a curriculum, educators attempt to provide necessary weight to
each part of the design.

In balance curriculum, students must obtain and use knowledge in ways that
progress their personal, social and intellectual goals.

Doll states that achieving balance is difficult because we are striving to

localize and individualize the curriculum while trying to maintain a common
content.

Having a balanced curriculum involves constant modification as well as

balance in one’s philosophy and psychology of learning.
 Guidelines for Curriculum Design

The following statements identify some steps that can be taken in designing a curriculum. These
statements, drawn from observations of school practice, are applicable to whatever design is selected.

• Create a curriculum design committee comprising teachers, parents, community members, administrators,
and if appropriate, students.

• Create a schedule for meetings to make curriculum-design decisions.

• Gather data about educational issues and suggested solutions.

• Process data on available curriculum designs, and compare designs with regard to advantages and
disadvantages such as cost, scheduling, class size, student population characteristics, students’ academic
strengths, adequacy of learning environments, and match with existing curricula. Also assess whether the
community is likely to accept the design.

• Schedule time for reflection on the design.

• Schedule time for revision of the design.

• Explain the design to educational colleagues, community members, and if appropriate, students.
 TYPES OF CURRICULUM DESIGNS
Subject-Centered Designs Learner-Centered Designs Problem-Centered Designs

 Subject design  Child-centered design  Life Situation design

 Discipline design  Experience-centered design

 Social problem/
 Broad field design  Romantic/radical design
reconstructionist design

 Correlation design  Humanistic-design

 Process design
 Subject-Centered Designs
1. Subject Design
• The oldest and best-known school design to both teachers and laypeople is the subject
design.

• Henry Morrison claimed that the subject matter curriculum aimed most to literacy, and
therefore should be the focus of the elementary curriculum and secondary students create
interest and competencies in specific subject areas.

• While in the mid-1930s, Robert Hutchins indicated which subjects such a curriculum design
would comprise a school
1) Language and its uses (reading, writing, grammar, literature)
2) Mathematics
3) Sciences
4) History
5) Foreign languages
 1. Subject Design (Cont.)
• The curriculum is organized according to how essential knowledge has developed in various
subject areas in the subject matter design.

• Supporters of this design uphold the importance of verbal activities, claiming that
knowledge and ideas are best communicated and stored in verbal form.

• This design is easy to present because complementary textbooks and support materials are
commercially available.

• The subject design emphasizes content and disregards students’ needs, interest, and
experiences.

• For Dewey, the curriculum should emphasize both subject matter and the learner.
 2. Discipline Design
• Proponents of this design like Arthur King and John Brownell, point out that a
discipline is specific knowledge that has the following important characteristics:

a community of persons
an expression of human imagination
a domain
a tradition
a mode of inquiry
a conceptual structure
specialized language
a heritage of literature
a network of communications
a valuative and affective stance
an instructive community
 2. Discipline Design (Cont.)
• This new design acquired popularity during the 1950s and reached its peak during the mid 1960s.

• The disciplined knowledge emphasizes Science, Mathematics, English, history and some other
disciplines.

• Bruner states, “Getting to know something is an adventure in how to account for a great many things
that you encounter in as simple and elegant a way as possible.” This relies on students’ engaging
with a discipline’s content and methods.

• Joseph Schwab called the “substantive structure” and Philip Phenix called “realms of meaning”.

• Harry Broudy named such knowledge as “applicative knowledge” (e.g. problem-solving procedures).

• Bruner also stated that “any subject can be taught in some effectively honest form to any child at
any stage of development”.
 3. Broad-Fields Design
• This design is also known to others as the interdisciplinary design.

• Educators can simply combine two or more related subjects, presently familiar in the school, into a
single broader field of study.

• The unique feature of broad-fields design was stimulated in the Sputnik era and Broudy and his
colleagues suggested that the entire curriculum be organized into these categories:
1) Symbolic of information (English, foreign languages, and mathematics)
2) Basic sciences (general science, biology, physics, and chemistry)
3) Developmental studies (evolution of the cosmos, of social institutions, and human culture)
4) Exemplars (modes of aesthetic experience, including art, music, drama, and literature)
5) “Moral problems” that would address typical social problems
 4. Correlational Design
• Correlation design which attempts to identify ways in which
subjects can be linked yet maintain their own identities.

• Perhaps the most frequently correlated subjects are English

literature and history at the secondary level and language arts
and social studies at the elementary level.

• At present, few teachers use correlation design maybe because

it compels them to plan their lessons cooperatively.
 5. Process Designs
• In this curricular design must develop learners on how to
learn the application of process to subject matter.

• Process designs focus on the student as meaning maker.

• This design stresses those procedures that allow students to

analyze reality and construct frameworks different from the
way the world appears to the casual viewer.
Learner-Centered Designs
1. Child-Centered Design
• The design should be centered on students’ lives, needs, and interests.

• Henrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel, who claimed that children would achieve self-
realization through social participation, which they expressed as the principle of learning
by doing.

• Quincy system (name of the place where Parker worked in Quincy, Massachusetts) is an
approach to curriculum that teachers should allow children to experience the content as
geographer out in the field would, by making observations, recording them in
sketchbooks, and analyzing them.

• Child-centered design often credited to Dewey, was actually formulated by Parker, who
set its foundation.
 2. Experience-Centered Design
• The view that a curriculum cannot be predesigned, that the whole thing must be prepared “on the
spot” as a teacher responds to each child, makes experience-centered design almost hopeless to
implement.

• In this curriculum, highlights the learners’ interest, creativity, and self-direction.

• In this design, the teacher’s role is to build an inspiring learning environment in which students can
explore, come into direct contact with knowledge, and observe others’ learning actions.

• For Dewey, educators must analyze children’s experiences and see how these experiences formed
children’s knowledge.

• Students are authorized to shape their own learning within the context provided by the teacher.
 3. Romantic (Radical) Design
• It basically follows Rousseau’s position on the value of attending to the
nature of individuals and Pestalozzi’s philosophy that individuals can find
their true selves by looking to their own nature.

• This describe primarily on the opinions of more recent philosophers: Paulo

Freire, a radical Brazilian educator and Jurgen Habermas, a German
philosopher.

• The radicals reflect current society as corrupt, suppressive, and powerless to

remedy itself.

• School using their curricula to indoctrinate and then control students rather
than to educate and liberate them.
 3. Romantic (Radical) Design (cont.)
• Paulo Freire believes that educators should inform the masses about their oppression,
provoke them to feel dissatisfied with their condition, and give them the skills necessary
for correcting the identified injustices.

• Jurgen Habermas theory emphasized that education’s goal is liberation of the awareness,
skills, and attitudes that people find necessary to take control of their lives.

• The biggest difference between mainstream educators and radicals is that radicals view
society as deeply flawed and believe that education indoctrinates students to serve
controlling groups.

• Curricula with a radical design address social and economic inequality and injustice and
foster respect for diversity. They are overtly political.
 4. Humanistic Design
• This design gained prominence in the 1960s and ‘70s.

• After World War II, humanistic design linked to existentialism in educational

philosophy.

• This new psychological orientation stressed that human action was more than a
reaction to a stimulus, that meaning was more important than methods, that the
emphasis of consideration should be on the subjective rather than the objective
nature of human existence, and that there is an association between learning and
feeling.

• From this framework, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
(ASCD) published its 1962 yearbook, Perceiving, Behaving, Becoming.
 4. Humanistic Design (cont.)
• Abraham Maslow’s view of self-actualization was heavily influenced by
humanistic design. Maslow enumerated the characteristics of a self-
actualized person:
1. Accepting of self, others, and nature
2. Spontaneous, simple, and natural
3. Problem-oriented
4. Open to experiences beyond the ordinary
5. Empathetic and sympathetic toward the less fortunate
6. Sophisticated in interpersonal relations
7. Favoring democratic decision making
8. Possessing a philosophical sense of humor
 4. Humanistic Design (cont.)
• This humanistic education also realizes that the cognitive, affective, and
psychomotor domains are interrelated and that a curriculum should address these
dimensions.

• Here are some of the criticisms of humanistic design:

1. It fails adequately consider the consequences for learners

2. Its stress on human uniqueness conflicts with its stresses on activities that all
students experience
3. It overemphasizes the individual, ignoring society’s needs
4. Some critics accuse, that humanistic design does not incorporate insight from
behaviorism and cognitive developmental theory.
 Table 4.2 The Curriculum Matrix

In designing a curriculum, keep in mind the various levels at which we can

consider the curriculum’s content components. The following list of curriculum
dimensions should assist in considering content in-depth.

1. Consider the content’s intellectual dimension. This is perhaps the curriculum’s

most commonly thought of dimension. The content selected should stimulate
student’s intellectual development.
2. Consider the content’s emotional dimension. We know much less about this
dimension, but we are obtaining a better understanding of it as the affective
domain of knowledge.
3. Consider the content’s social dimension. The content selected should
contribute to students’ social development and stress human relations.
 Table 4.2 The Curriculum Matrix (cont.)

4. Consider the content’s physical dimension, commonly referred to as the

psychomotor domain of knowledge. Content should be selected to develop
physical skills and allow students to become more physically self-aware.
5. Consider the content’s aesthetic dimension. People have an aesthetic
dimension, yet we currently have little knowledge of aesthetics’ place in
education.
6. Consider the content’s transcendent or spiritual dimension, which most public
schools almost totally exclude from consideration. We tend to confuse this
dimension with formal religion. This content dimension does not directly relate
to the rational. However, we need to have content that causes students to reflect
on the nature of their humanness and helps them transcend their current levels
of knowledge and action.
• Foshay, A. (1990)
 Problem-Centered Designs
Problem-Centered Designs
Problem-centered curriculum designs are planned to strengthen cultural traditions
and address unmet needs of the community and society.
Curricular organization depends in large part on the nature of the problems to be
reviewed while its content often extends beyond subject boundaries.
Various types of problem-centered design differ in the levels to which they
emphasize social needs as opposed to individuals. Like,
1. some of them focus on persistent life situations;
2. others center on contemporary social problems
3. some address areas of living
4. others are concerned with reconstructing society
 1. Life-Situations Designs
This curriculum design can be traced back to the nineteenth century and Herbert
Spencer’s writings on a curriculum for complete living. Spencer’s curriculum
stressed activities that
1. sustain life.
2. enhance life
3. aid in rearing children
4. maintain the individual’s social and political relations
5. enhance leisure, tasks, and feelings

The Commission on the Reorganizational of Secondary Education, of the United

States sponsored by the National Education Association, recommended this design
in 1918.
 1. Life-Situations Designs (cont.)
The commission outlined a curriculum that would deal with health, command of
fundamentals, “worthy home membership”, vocation, citizenship, leisure, and ethical
character.

Three rules are fundamental to life-situation design:

1. dealing with persistent life situations is crucial to a society’s successful functioning, and it
makes educational sense to organize a curriculum around them;
2. students will see the relevance of content if it is organized around aspects of community life;
3. having students study social or life situations will directly involve them in improving society.

The strength of this design is its focus on problem-solving procedures.

The additional strength of this design is that it uses learners’ past and present experiences
to get them to examine the basic aspects of living.
 2. Reconstructionist Design
 Educators who support this design feel that the curriculum should promote social action aimed at
reconstructing society.

 It should promote society’s social, political; and economic development. Educators want to emphasize
social justice to its curricula.

 George Counts who considered society to be totally reorganized to promote the common good.

 Harold Rugg believed that schools should engage children in critical analysis of society in order to improve
it.

 For Theodore Brameld, who advocated reconstructionism well into the 1950s, claimed that
reconstructionist were committed to facilitating the emergence of a new culture.

 The major purpose of the social reconstructionist curriculum is to involve students in critical examination
of the local, national, and international community in order to address humanity’s problems.
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