Policy and Curriculum

Although curriculum is a fundamental part of the framework of schooling, curriculum decisions and choices are shaped in large measure by other considerations—ideology, personal values, issues in the public domain, and interests. Curriculum decisions are often part of a much larger public debate that often extends beyond education to larger questions of public goods.

Curriculum is complicated. At first glance, one might think that curriculum is just a set of documents to be taught to students. However, as you delve deeper and consider everything that is taught and learned in a classroom, curriculum becomes much more involved … Curriculum is ‘a complicated system of interpretation, interactions, transmissions – planned and unplanned’. Curriculum is complicated – particularly when examined within its relationship with teaching.

Curriculum Policy and The Politics of What Should Be Learned in Schools gives insight into just how political schooling and curriculum is.  One of the quotes that stood out to me the most is: “education policy is particularly susceptible to this situation as pretty well everyone has some experience of schooling and therefore opinions about how it ought to work (Levin, 2007, pg. 10).  Because of this “people see curriculum as a collection of subjects and topics without necessarily requiring coherence or integration across the curriculum” (Levin, 2007, pg. 15).   No other industry shares this characteristic and because of this, schooling is dominated by politics.  And one key element to politics is the fact that majority opinion dominates.  “Political processes are driven by interests, and particularly by the most vocal interests” (Levin, 2007, pg. 22).  Instead of kids learning what is most beneficial to them and teachers teaching in the most beneficial ways, students and teachers are restricted by governments by governments whose sole focus is to get re-elected. 

There are a few more things I found interesting in this article.  The first is the fact that most Canadian parents want their children to learn more of every subject in the school curriculum, but do not want longer school days or school years to make up for it (Levin, 2007, pg. 14 & 15).  It seems like we as a Canadian society value education but are not willing to make sacrifices to make our education system better.  Another thing I found interesting in this article was the discussion regarding experts and the curriculum.  Prior to reading this article, I believed that experts in their respective subjects should have a large majority of say when designing curriculum, but this article swayed my opinion on this.  “The danger in an expert-dominated curriculum development process is that the product will be something that can be used effectively only by people with high levels of expertise (Levin, 2007, pg. 17).  Teachers are extremely knowledge in many subjects, but teachers are not experts, and this is the exact thing you would want to avoid when designing a curriculum. 

The second document, The Saskatchewan Way: Professionally Led Curriculum Development, gives insight into curriculum development in Saskatchewan and calls for teachers to be actively involved in curriculum discussions.  It is important for teachers to be involved in these discussions because the curriculum is more than “just a set of documents to be taught to students” (STF, 2016, pg. 3).  Teachers and former teachers are the only people at the curriculum discussion table that have experience trying to translate the curriculum documents into active teaching and learning.   In this document, you also learn that Saskatchewan has been one of the leading provinces in the country regarding teachers being actively involved in the curriculum discussion process, which has been termed the “Saskatchewan way”.  “The Saskatchewan Way. . . fostered teacher ownership of the curriculum (broadly understood) and its development processes, which were necessarily inclusive and collaborative in nature” (STF, 2016, pg. 5).  It is vital to our education system that we stay that way.  You would not tell a doctor, firefighter, mechanic, etc. how to do their job so why has it become normalized in other parts of the country and the world to tell teachers how to do theirs?