Module 3: Curriculum Designs

Connections to Curriculum Design

Our Mind Map Extension

What Mark K. and I enjoyed about partner work, beyond the analysis and discovery of new information, is to work with someone who shares a common vision for education.

Overall, we see a need for the old perennial model of curriculum (Top-down approach) as being archaic and exclusionary to minority and low-income learners. This is not a curriculum that lines itself with a country that has a population that is becoming more diverse and a society where the gap betw
een the rich and the poor is growing. We see that a more humanistic approach to curriculum design is needed to ensure we are offering everyone a fair chance at success.

Just the other day in Ontario, the government passed a bill that allows Directors of Education in school boards do not have any classroom experience, they don’t need to be or have been a teacher to oversee an education system. We find this to be a step toward the perennial system as curriculum design should be developed primarily from the ‘bottom-up’. The process of designing an equitable and progressive curriculum cannot be undertaken using a mechanical perspective.

We also note that there needs to be some flexibility when discussing philosophical positions on the curriculum. As Ornstein notes: “Curriculum specialists who are unwilling to modify their points of view, or compromise philosophical positions when school officials or their colleagues espouse another philosophy, are at risk of causing conflict and disrupting the school” When making curricular designs and decisions we need to ensure equity plays a role in our discussions. Disagreements are healthy but being unwilling to compromise is damaging.

It is also important to allow schools to design themselves in a way that works for them. What works in an urban school setting may not apply to a rural or northern school setting. Different boards in a province will be dealing with a different clientele. Allowing for school-based decisions on assessment and curriculum interpretation again provides a more humanistic approach to learning. In the Ornstein article, a quote from Brandt and Tyler (1983) notes: “Curriculum workers need to provide assistance in developing and designing school practices that coincide with the philosophy of the school and community. Teaching, learning, and curriculum are all interwoven in school practices and should reflect a school's and a community's philosophy.” Allowing for school-based decisions allows administrators, teachers, and community members to design schools that work for them.

We see this through the lens of St. Anne School in Saskatchewan, and A.E. Wright & Maples Collegiate in Winnipeg. The teachers at these schools collaborated together and decided to focus on inquiry-based learning in order to better serve their specific clientele. They flipped assessment on its head by focussing more on formative assessment instead of summative. The student's voice was also included within the discussions surrounding curriculum design and more flexibility was provided to engage student learning. We’ve incorporated these changes into our visual mind map. You will notice that planning is linked to student interest, needs, and their lived experiences. While instruction is based on inquiry, connections to the cultures of said students, with an emphasis on cyclical learning; drawn from Indigenous perspectives on holistic education wherein students become learners and teachers of content. There also comes a change to assessment practices. Students are now actively engaged, they take responsibility for their learning by designing the parameters for success, and what they might look like through process and products.

As we mentioned earlier we see curriculum design as needed to support all learners and this absolutely means indigenizing our curriculum to support First-Nations Metis and Inuit learners (FNMI). We see value in shifting instruction methods to encourage learning about FNMI culture and to support the learning of our FNMI students. There is a saying used “What is good for the FNMI learner is good for all learners.” The rich culture lends well to a humanistic approach to the curriculum. The use of elders in education is also a powerful resource that not only transfers knowledge to students but also challenges students to use different skills such as listening, interpretation of knowledge, and other cross-curricular notions. For as we learned in this module according to Castellon: “When an Elder dies a library burns.”

We feel that the change to our diagram comes from the above mentioned information. We found this module to be extremely beneficial to our understanding of curricular design and see our visual as now being more complete.

Hayes, D. (2003) Making learning an effect of schooling: aligning curriculum, assessment and pedagogy, Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education, 24(2), 225-245

McMillan, J. H. (2014).  Classroom assessment: Principles and practice for effective standards-based instruction (6th ed., pp. 1-20,  57-64,74-88). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Shepard, L. A. (2000). The role of assessment in a learning culture. Educational Researcher, 29(7), 4-14. doi:10.3102/0013189X029007004

Ornstein, A. C., & Hunkins, F. P. (2013). Curriculum: Foundations, principles, and issues (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.  Read Chapter 6, pp. 149-173.

Ornstein, A. C. (1990/1991). Philosophy as a basis for curriculum decisions. The High School Journal, 74, 102-109.

https://www.adriennecastellon.com/2019/06/19/a-call-to-personal-research-indigenizing-your-curriculum/