Syllabus Design and Development

Unit 2.1 Consolidate your understanding of reasons for having a curriculum and
analyse three curriculum types

What a curriculum is and what it’s for

We saw in unit 1 that a curriculum sets out an official policy for learning across all subjects.
We saw also that a key purpose of the curriculum is to state its beliefs about learning. This
provides guidance for schools and teachers to design and develop a syllabus for their
particular subject which is feasible for classroom use.

Typical curriculum components: vision, values and principles

The policy laid out in a curriculum typically includes a vision of how education will influence
society in the future, and values it expects learners to learn and practise as citizens. Very
often a curriculum document will also state principles of learning which reflect these values.
For example, a national curriculum might provide a vision of a society in which people have
high rates of digital literacy, and good access to job opportunities. Desirable values it wants
citizens to uphold might include showing compassion towards others, developing respect
towards other cultures, and showing curiosity about ideas. Learning principles which might
contribute towards these values could include an emphasis on learning to learn, on
intercultural awareness, and on critical and creative thinking.

Clearly, vision, values and principles are likely to reflect the curriculum designers’ beliefs
about learning. These beliefs are worth explaining and exploring, as they shape curriculum
content and aims. In turn, curriculum content and aims should influence syllabus learning
objectives, content and assessment procedures. These syllabus dimensions are intended to
filter into the classroom in the form of what and how learners learn and teachers teach,
learning materials, and assessment focus.

This article now considers 3 common types of curriculum with regard to beliefs about
learning

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 Curriculum type 1: Academic rationalism

Where does academic rationalism come from?

This is the oldest of the 3 sets of beliefs looked at in this article. It dates back to fourth and
third century BC Athens, particularly the writings of Plato (The Republic and The Laws).

What is academic rationalism?

An academic rationalist curriculum aims to maintain and transmit the wisdom and culture of
previous generations. Those who learn and understand the intricacies of this cultural
heritage become an elite who have the necessary qualities to hold positions of power and
authority in society.

An academic rationalist approach to education in practice typically limits access to this

cultural heritage via exams or school types (e.g. grammar school and secondary modern
school in Britain’s recent history). Educational standards are often upheld by an inspectorate
and by external examination boards controlled by universities. This tends to result in a two-
tier school system. The elite go to schools which prioritise intellectual achievement for its
own sake, while the masses go to schools which focus less on intellectual prowess and
more on practical needs.

What beliefs about learning does an academic rationalist curriculum typically have?
The importance of the learner’s intellectual development is paramount. The main
characteristic of an academic rationalist curriculum is thus the stress it places on the value of
learning the subject for the value the subject has, rather than as a means to a practical goal..

There is an emphasis on broad educational capacities such as the ability to analyse,

memorise and reconstruct elements of knowledge. An academic rationalist languages
curriculum would focus less on the communicative purposes of language and more on the
mental discipline and benefits of language learning. One benefit of language learning, in an
academic rationalist view, is learning about the culture and thinking of the country or
countries who use the target language. This explains why academic rationalist language
curricula often value the teaching of literature, as this can fulfil an objective of assimilating a
culture through the medium of studying texts written by its important writers.

Teaching and assessment in an academic rationalist curriculum

The curriculum designer usually breaks subject content down into its constituent parts,
grading it from what they perceive as simple to complex. The teacher’s role is to transmit the
content in a given sequence, often with a coursebook which follows the same progression.
The typical methodology involves the teacher in explaining and emphasising rules. The
learner’s role is to learn and then apply rules usually in controlled contexts, and later in more
open ones. Assessment consists largely of tests which are norm-referenced. The purpose of
norm-referenced assessment is to discriminate between higher and lower achievers in order
to create a rank order of learners’ performance, from top to bottom. Those who achieve the
best test scores are selected as the elite, who pass on to the next stage of education, while
learners with lower scores receive a different form of education.

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 Curriculum type 2: Social and economic efficiency

Where does the idea of social and economic efficiency come from?
It is difficult to pinpoint one specific origin for social and economic efficiency, but some argue
that an early 20th century concern for efficient performance in factories is a key influence.
Franklin Bobbitt, one of the founders of curriculum studies, argued in The Curriculum (1918),
that the factory and production was a suitable metaphor for curriculum development.

In 1956, Bloom and colleagues produced a well-known taxonomy in six tiers of complexity of
cognitive educational objectives, and affective objectives in1964. The 1956 taxonomy,
updated in 2001, was intended to help teachers understand and work with behavioural
objectives. The work of Bloom and colleagues builds on this idea of focussing on
measurable results of learning.

What is social and economic efficiency?

Social and economic efficiency is a belief that humans can improve themselves and their
environment through careful setting of objectives and detailed follow-up planning.
In essence, then, social and economic efficiency sees planned education as a means to
bring about social and economic change.

Its key components are

• the equal valuing of all citizens, regardless of their levels of ability or achievement
• comprehensive rather than selective education
• agreeing educational objectives and then planning for these rigorously
• promoting understanding between people via effective communication.

What beliefs about learning s does a social and economic efficiency curriculum
typically have?
In contrast to academic rationalism, which favours content and the study of a language for its
own sake, social and economic efficiency prioritises language learning objectives and skills-
based foreign language learning. Essentially, it is a means-ends approach to foreign
language learning, the end being to communicate effectively.

The key steps in designing a social and economic efficiency curriculum, set out by Taba in
1962, will be familiar from unit 1 of this course . They involve
1. A needs analysis
2. Designing objectives based on the needs
3. Selecting content
4. Organising content
5. Selecting learning experiences and materials
6. Organising learning experiences and materials
7. Deciding what to assess and how to assess it

In its strong form, the curriculum is about changing learner behaviour through the setting of
prespecified measurable curriculum learning targets.

In its weaker form, social and economic efficiency sees learning to communicate effectively
learning as an organic rather than a linear process, with learning targets needing to be
reviewed and adjusted as necessary.

Much of the Council of Europe’s work on modern foreign languages (which led to the
publication of CEFR in 2001) is based on the thinking of this weaker interpretation of the

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social and economic efficiency curriculum. Chapter 2 in Clark (see the references at the end
of this article) has more on this.

Teaching and assessment in a social and economic efficiency curriculum

The teacher’s role is to help learners to communicate effectively and thereby understand
each other. The teacher therefore prioritises learnability and usefulness of language in
contexts relevant to learners’ needs. This priority often involves a focus on the meaning of
functional language useful in target situations, though teaching may make some explicit
reference to language form as well as meaning. As learners make progress, the teacher
provides support by recycling target language. This recycling also adds challenge by
exposing learners to different varieties of the same language functions and situations at
higher levels, so that learners can express more nuanced meaning.

Assessment is generally criterion referenced and formative, i.e. learners’ language skills are
assessed against criteria of language proficiency with teachers and learners using the
feedback from assessment in order to plan future learning targets.

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 Curriculum type 3: Humanism

Where does the idea of humanism come from?

Humanism can be traced back to the ideas of Rousseau, the eighteenth century Swiss
philosopher, who argued that the closer humans are to nature, they better off they are
spiritually. More recent significant influences in humanism are the Swiss and American
psychologists Jean Piaget and Carl Rogers, who both supported the idea of learning from
experience.

What is humanism?
Humanism places the learner, rather than the subject, or learning targets, at the centre of
learning. Humanism sees the learner as a unique individual who can achieve their full
emotional, social, and intellectual potential through their own efforts and experiences.

What beliefs about learning does a humanist curriculum typically have?

In contrast to the emphasis on content and objectives respectively of the other 2 curriculum
types, a humanist curriculum is concerned with methodology, i.e. how language learning.
happens.

This means that a humanist curriculum will tend to be less structured than the type 1 and 2
curricula we’ve discussed earlier. This is because it will often focus on processes involved of
language learning, and devote less time to formal discussion of grammar, vocabulary or
other specific aspects of in language learning. In contrast to the social and economic
efficiency curriculum, a humanist curriculum is more concerned with the means to successful
languages learning than the end. Such a focus is intended to help teachers to develop a
classroom in which inquiry, open-ended discussion, reflection, and divergent interpretations
feature as a means to cater for learners’ individual needs and potential, rather than a
classroom with predetermined content, objectives, and set specifications of performance.

Teaching and assessment in a humanism curriculum

As personal growth achieved by learning through experience is the main principle, then, of
humanism, teachers have a strong facilitative role in the classroom, and less of a direct
teaching role. In order to help learners to be self-directed, teachers may help them to choose
which skills or knowledge are important to them, give them a choice of activities in class, and
customise materials and teaching methods to different learners. This, may, at times, involve
negotiation between learners and between learners and teacher.

Learning tasks typically focus on creativity, inquiry, and curiosity rather than the restatement
of facts, with mistakes seen by both teacher and learner as a natural part of learning. During
class, if learners meet with comprehension, vocabulary or grammar problems, a teacher will
often encourage them to suggest their own solutions.

Humanism also asserts that learning is most meaningful and effective when it happens in a
non-threatening classroom atmosphere, and so teachers are expected to pay considerable
attention to creating a secure, positive, inclusive learning environment.

As the main thrust of humanism is the independence and individuality of the learner, self-
assessment is generally preferable to teacher assessment, as humanism views it as a
central component in successful learning. When the teacher does assess learning, the
emphasis is on formative assessment, with learners being given opportunities to improve if
their work does not meet an assessment criterion.

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 Summary of curriculum types 1, 2 and 3

We have seen that academic rationalism values the teaching and learning of subject matter,
social and economic efficiency values results and planning, and humanism individual growth.

Clearly, there is little benefit to be gained from designing a curriculum which reflects a strong
form of any of these beliefs because each strand alone is an inadequate vehicle for effective
language learning. A strong adherence to type 1 could leave a learner knowing a lot about
the language, but being unable to communicate effectively in it. A strong version of type 2
could pay insufficient attention to learner differences and to the affective dimension in
learning. The danger of a type 3 process approach to curriculum design is that the learner
could have an interesting journey, but never arrive at a destination.

In sum, the intellectual, artistic and cultural priorities of academic rationalism, the practical
communication skills of social and economic efficiency, and the personal development in
humanism may all be relevant in different ways to learners. It follows from this that a
sensible approach to curriculum design and development is to produce a curriculum which
integrates elements of each set of beliefs in proportions which suit the learning context.

Further Reading

This article is based on Clark (1987 p6-51) and Richards 2001 p113-120). If you want to
read these sources, the references are:

Clark, J. (1987) Curriculum Renewal in School Foreign Language Learning Oxford: Oxford
University Press
(available free from the Internet archive https://archive.org/details/ilhem_20150323_1348
accessed 27/11/18)

Richards, J. (2001) Curriculum Development in Language Teaching Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

The Taba reference cited in the article comes from:

Taba, H. (1962) Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice New York: Harcourt Brace
and World.