The meaning of curriculum development and the role of an outsider

Blanchard, John Arthur (1990) The meaning of curriculum development and the role of an outsider. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

The origin of this thesis is a curriculum development project - an enterprise which brought school teachers and advisory teachers together in attempts to improve means by which pupils' achievements are recorded. The thesis explores what one can be conscious of and articulate about in running and developing the curriculum: as a teacher, as an advisory teacher, as an administrator and manager. Throughout, aspects of learning, teaching and curriculum development are treated both at a theoretical level of general discussion and at a practical level of narrative or documentary exemplification. Facets of becoming conscious and articulate are further discussed through intermittent reflections on the thesis-writing process itself. Heuristic and hermeneutic actions are defined through the critical observation of gaps and tensions between intention and effect, participation and explanation, conception and apperception - in teaching, advising, and writing.

Alternative attitudes to and motivations in teaching and the treatment of teachers are explored. Attention is paid to different perceptions of what might be regular and what not, what might be repeatable and reversible and what not, what might be a modification of and what a departure from precedents and conventions, and what might be explicit and what implicit, both in teaching and in attempts to change teaching. A crucial focus is predictability and time-dependence. Differences between teacher-practitioners' and non-practitioners' perspectives are discussed. Implications are pursued as far as administration and management are concerned. Practitioners are shown necessarily to operate, however tacitly, at a principled level in order to cope with the multifariousness of the particular situations they confront: what relation such general principles bear to the general principles promoted by non-practitioners needs to be made apparent through the latter's efforts in grasping the particulars of practitioners' experience.

Appendices present both working papers intended to guide advisory teachers and material from publications which have informed the thesis and practices dealt with here.

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