Curriculum

The term curriculum is widely used among educators at all levels of education. Because of the many ways in which it has been defined, individuals may not be referring to the same concept when discussing curriculum. This entry discusses the common conceptions of curriculum and how these conceptions have changed in recent years.

Often curriculum is described as something that is planned and expected to be taught and learned. However, what is taught (actual vs. anticipated), how something is taught (the type of instructional strategies and medium used to implement what is to be taught), and the degree to which what is taught is actually learned, executed, accomplished, demonstrated, or observed and how it is evaluated are often questions left to evaluator inquiry or form the basis of researchers’ studies.

In the mid-20th century, common conceptions of curriculum were plan, system, field of study, experience, and content. Curriculum as a plan refers to what content or skills an educator anticipates teaching. Curriculum as a system refers to the people, processes, and organizational structures that guide planning, teaching, and measuring the taught content.

Curriculum as a field of study refers to the disciplinary emphasis of curriculum as a body of content in its own right to be mastered, which is guided by theory, principles, and practice. Curriculum as experience refers to what learners undergo in an educational system or organization either directly or indirectly as a result of what they are taught by the personnel who provide instructional and measurement activities. Curriculum as content refers to the subject or disciplinary matter and/or psychomotor or affective skills that are taught.

Owing to the influence of postmodernism, conceptions of curriculum that emerged in the later 20th and early 21 centuries were the null, hidden, and transformative curriculums. The null curriculum refers to what is not taught within the subject matter or content, such as particular viewpoints, historical events, or nuanced perspectives. The null curriculum in effect restricts the range of perspectives that are offered to students and results from the educational background of the instructor, the reigning political stance of the locale in which curriculum is taught, or that which is influenced by the preferences of the region, the community, or district where the individual school resides.

The hidden curriculum refers to the values and cultural norms that characterize the learning community, the types of interactions that are permitted or excluded within a particular course which in turn are inherently contextualized by location or time, content or material, and student and instructional members of a learning community that remain openly unacknowledged. Nonetheless, the hidden curriculum is believed to exhibit an influence on both curriculum and student outcomes. From another perspective, the hidden curriculum could be described as the nonverbal experiences that are felt by students because they are transmitted through action, though left unspoken. The hidden curriculum can be inferred by the lack of equal treatment and equality of educational opportunities for all students as well as the practice of tracking and unequal implementation of discipline policies that are in direct conflict with the belief that schools provide equality of opportunities for all of their students.

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