Balancing Act: Respecting the Required Curriculum While Honouring the Real Curriculum (original) (raw)
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Learning to open a communal space for a global conversation, collective production and discussion on those issues of high concern for Member States. It intends to support country efforts in mainstreaming challenging issues within the processes of curriculum renewal and development across different levels, settings and provisions of the education system. Initially, the focus areas of the In-Progress Reflections series encompass, among others,: (i) Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) as a foundation of holistic child development and learning; (ii) Reading and writing in early grades to support the development of essential competencies; (iii) Youth Culture and competencies for Youth in the early 21st century (covering formal, non-formal and informal education); (iv) ICT curricula and inclusive pedagogy contributing to relevant and effective learning outcomes; (v) STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) curricula to foster sustainable development; (vi) Curriculum for Global Citizenship Education (peace, human rights, sustainable development, values, ethics, multiculturalism, etc.); (vii) Assessment to enhance and support learning opportunities and (viii) Inclusive education as an over guiding principle of education systems.
2015
The role of assessment in education has grown greatly over the past few decades, a trend that has two major manifestations. One is the rapid increase in the number of countries and other jurisdictions either participating in international surveys (tests) of learning or initiating their own system-wide assessments; or both. The other is the ever-rising importance of assessment to hold systems and their key actors (notably teachers) accountable for education outcomes. The recent renewal by the world’s nations and lead international organizations at Incheon, Republic of Korea of their commitment to an education “of quality” for all by 2030 and the upcoming global commitment to the new Sustainable Development Goals will now ‘raise the bar’ for education in terms both of equity and of how to perceive “quality,” which now requires a much more relevant lens. Measuring progress towards these goals will begin with the assessment of learning, to determine both whether students are acquiring t...
Abstract The growing demands on higher education have placed an unprecedented external pull on universities. Bernstein (Pedagogy, symbolic control and idenity: theory, research, critique, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., Lanham, 2000) refers to this ‘‘outward’’ pull of the late twentieth century as the ‘‘regionalization of knowledge’’. One of the consequences of this ‘‘facing outward’’ is contestation over curriculum and what should be privileged. Should it privilege knowing, doing or being? Should it foreground formative training in the basic sciences or applied problem-solving? Is its priority educating the mind or preparing for a vocation? These questions can set up a series of ‘‘false choices’’ about the purpose of higher education, what it means to be educated and what our priorities should be in curriculum reform. The aim of this paper was to move the discourse beyond these polarities by making visible the ‘‘stakes’’ in the curriculum reform debate illustrated in Muller thinkpieces. The paper offers a conceptual framework for understanding current curriculum contestation and applies the framework in an illustrative manner to a particular higher education curriculum reform initiative in South Africa. The framework shows how ‘‘what does it mean to be educated?’’ will vary depending on the different types and hence purposes of curriculum.
Exploring tangled interrelationships between assessment and curriculum
2022
The articles in this edition of Assessment Matters draw on both international and national research to explore the dynamics of the interplay between curriculum and assessment. The collection we present here begins with an assessment focus, drawing on science education as the context that introduces a curriculum element. The dilemmas explored in the various articles are not limited to science education of course. We hope the collection invites readers from a range of curriculum subjects to ponder implications for their own disciplines. The articles represent the collective effort of the Science Education Special Interest Group (SIG) of the NZARE. In all, eight members of the SIG (along with some associates) explore aspects of the complex, dynamic space between assessment and the science curriculum. These articles come from varying perspectives and are set in different educational contexts. Why choose a subject-specific focus? The collection had its genesis in a number of interesting developments and dilemmas that arise in the highly liminal space between curriculum and assessment. We briefly expand on some of these, as a prelude to the articles that follow.
Any learner, from any background, in any school will find themselves at some point faced with the inevitable: The assessment. Once a terrifying prospect, nowadays not so but always with great benefits in the learning process. Regardless of the degree of students' participation in the process, the assessment dominates students' learning. The time that assessment was a monolithic work of the teacher has long passed and the assessed is no more passive. (Brown, Bull and Pendlebury, 1997) They bring in the class an amount of pre-existing knowledge (Klibanoff et al, 2006) so wide and rich that cannot and should not pass unobserved by any informed assessment system. Introduction and Background
Editorial
Curriculum: A neglected area in discourses on higher education
South African Journal of Higher Education, 2006
Extracted from text ... 189 Editorial Curriculum: A neglected area in discourses on higher education L. le Grange Department of Curriculum Studies Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch, South Africa Email: llg@sun.ac.za INTRODUCTION Curriculum is a complex and contested terrain that is variously described based on disparate philosophical lenses through which it is viewed. When the word curriculum is invoked it is generally understood as applying to school education, that is, to the prescribed learning programmes of schools or more broadly to the learning opportunities provided to school learners, rather than to higher education. A survey of articles published in prominent curriculum journals such as Journal ..