3 Curriculum and the Purpose of Education
Ed Beck
Before We Read
Before reading, spend some time thinking about the different decisions that teachers make everyday as they plan their classes. The materials teachers choose, the way they organize a class, what is emphasized or not, and what choices are offered to the students all shape the student experience. To be an engaged teacher, it is important to build reflective practices and the habit of making informed and deliberate instructional choices. Think about your favorite experiences in school. What choices did the educators make that contributed to your experience?
Critical Questions for Consideration
As you read, consider these essential questions: What are the goals of education? How is the experience of the students impacted by what is written or missing into the curriculum? What hidden lessons are we teaching students? In what ways are we, as educators, shaping our schools and communities through our curricular and instructional choices?
Introduction to Curriculum
A simple definition of curriculum would be the subjects and the course of study in a school or college. Curriculum and instruction is an entire sub-field of education. Definitions of curriculum vary. The differences in the definition of curriculum from educator to educator provide clues to the varying stances on education and what it means to be educated. For example, curriculum may refer to knowledge students are expected to have or may refer to certain skills or competencies students should be able to demonstrate.
Some educators describe the curriculum as a prescription, a series of interactions, lessons, and topics that ought to be included in an education. This is the most traditional definition of curriculum. A prescriptive curriculum would define bodies of knowledge and ways that it would be taught to students, serving as a master plan for teachers and administrators. For this group of educators, the curriculum is a series of experiences mapped across the students’ journey of growth preparing them for their adult lives. The mandated and planned part of the curriculum is sometimes referred to as the explicit curriculum. The explicit or planned curriculum refers to the topics and standards covered by a class and perhaps the documents that align with the standards such as lesson plans, textbooks, and other teaching aids.
An alternative way to look at curriculum is from the students’ lived experiences. This more holistic view of curriculum would include the lessons taught to students both formally and informally. From the student viewpoint, there is more that is learned in school than the planned subject areas. The implicit or hidden curriculum refers to the lessons and values that are not explicitly taught, but are implied and inferred by the students from classroom and school culture. The hidden curriculum is taught to students often unconsciously through how instructors interact with students: types of behavior the teacher pr