This document discusses curriculum in higher education through a series of slides. It begins with asking the reader to reflect on images related to curriculum and their own degree. It then discusses different views of what curriculum means, including balancing content, process, and purpose. It addresses tensions between covering too much content versus focusing on concepts. Finally, it considers curriculum as a complex, contested process involving different perspectives on knowledge and intellectual development.

1. Making sense of
curriculum in Higher
Education
Tansy Jessop
Visiting Professor BILT
24 January 2019

2. The Plan
• Your thoughts on curriculum
• A card game
• Theorising curriculum
• A way forward?
• Finishing with a poem.

3. Choose a picture that catches
your eye

4. Reflective jottings
• Why does the image appeal to you?
• How does the image relate to your understanding of
your own degree curriculum?
• What light does the image shed on the relationship
between teaching and the curriculum?

5. • You have 18 statements about curriculum
• You need to keep 9 and discard 6
• Discuss your understanding of the term
‘curriculum’
• Agree the 9 statements that best represent your
collective understanding
• Arrange your statements in a diamond, with your
favourites towards the top.
What is curriculum?
The diamond 9

6. Curriculum (n) running, chariot, course
What’s going on here?
What could possibly go wrong?
Who are the stakeholders?
What are their interests?

7. Balancing the WHAT, HOW and WHY
PRODUCT: structuring and managing content (WHAT)
PROCESS: the lived experience (HOW)
PRAXIS: wider purpose of HE, social justice, equality
(WHY)

8. Curriculum is…
…complicated
conversation
…a verb ‘currere’
rather than a
noun
…an intellectual rather
than an institutional or
bureaucratic pursuit
William Pinar

9. L.D. Fink (2003)
Creating significant
learning experiences:
an integrated
approach to course
design on college
courses
Significant Learning (Fink 2003)

10. Learning how to learn
Caring
Human dimension
Integration
Application
Foundational knowledge: Topics A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I…
The learning-
centred
paradigm
pushes
teaching and
learning in
this direction,
into multiple
dimensions of
learning
The content-centred paradigm pushes teaching and
learning in this direction, along one dimension of learning
Content vs learning-oriented (Fink 2003)

11. Too much stuff?
I can’t take it
all in!
This is frankly
terrifying!
Get me out
of here!
I forget
most of
what I read.

12. The over-stuffed curriculum

13. The best approach from the student’s perspective is to focus
on concepts. I’m sorry to break it to you, but your students are
not going to remember 90 per cent – possibly 99 per cent – of
what you teach them unless it’s conceptual…. when broad,
over-arching connections are made, education occurs. Most
details are only a necessary means to that end.
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/a-students-
lecture-to-rofessors/2013238.fullarticle#.U3orx_f9xWc.twitter
A student’s lecture to her professor….

14. But knowledge matters (Karl Maton)A balancing act?

16. Curriculum is contested
Who chooses
the what counts
as knowledge?
Knowledge must
compete to be in
the curriculum

17. Intellectual development in a nutshell
Model Stage 1 Stage 2 Stage 3 Stage 4
Perry Dualism Multiplicity Relativism Commitment
Baxter
Magolda
Absolute
Knowledge
Transitional Independent Contextual
self-
authorship

18. Curriculum as ‘personal knowing’

19. Solent’s ‘happy path’
A complex process
A team process
How plausible at Bristol?

20. Poetry reading