The Sunday Mail
Ityai Frank Kurebwa and Thomas Gatsi
We hope followers of this series found the last article informative and challenging to the intellect and we believe this presentation will present the reader with more food for thought especially educators.
In this article we look at the curriculum from a different perspective which rocked the United Kingdom and the United States in the ‘70s and ‘80s as well as our country.
Curriculum as a product
The modern look at education is to take it as a technical exercise where objectives are set, a plan drawn up, then applied in order for products to be measured as outcomes. In short, in this case the curriculum takes learners as objects that go through certain activities in order to be the product set out by specific objectives.
Objectives had to behavioural with learners expected to produce a specific pre-determined behaviour.
According to Franklin Bobbitt (1918:42): “The central theory [of curriculum] is simple. Human life, however varied, consists in the performance of specific activities.
Education that prepares for life is one that prepares definitely and adequately for these specific activities.
“However, numerous and diverse they may be for any social class they can be discovered. This requires only that one go out into the world of affairs and discover the particulars of which their affairs consist.
These will show the abilities, attitudes, habits, appreciations and forms of knowledge that men need. These will be the objectives of the curriculum.
“They will be numerous, definite and particularised. The curriculum will then be that series of experiences which children and youth must have by way of obtaining those objectives.”
Bobbitt’s theory could not be followed up in the 1920s and ‘30s because of the rise of the progressive theories that propagated child-centred learning.
Incidentally this movement only reached Zimbabwe’s African education in the 60’s with Joyce Childes and company followed up in the ‘70s with McPartridge (principal of The United College of Education), Josiah Hungwe (inspector of African Education) and others.
To follow up Bobbitt’s work, Ralph W Tyler picked up on the theory’s rationality and relative simplicity and came up with a theory that answered the following questions:
- What purposes should learning seek to attain?
- Through which educational experiences can a leaner attain the purposes?
- How can the educational experiences be effectively organised?
- How can we evaluate whether these purposes have been attained?
In order to avoid teacher-focussed activities, Tyler proposed that the curriculum’s objectives be behavioural, seeking to bring about significant changes to the learner’s pattern of behaviour.
This led to a technical and productive thinking as illustrated below:
Step 1: Diagnosis of need
Step 2: Formulation of objectives
Step 3: Selection of content
Step 4: Organisation of content
Step 5: Selection of learning experiences
Step 6: Organisation of learning experiences
Step 7: Determination of what to evaluate and of the ways and means of doing it.
One would find this approach of learning very attractive when compared to the syllabus approach but as always there are some shortcomings that have been observed.
The first weakness is the lack of learner and teacher/instructor’s input. Because activities to experienced are designed outside learning itself learners find themselves with no voice and have to follow everything as prescribed.
They are given what and how they are supposed to do specific activities as if they are robots. Educators are expected to apply the programmes and are judged by the products of their actions thus rendering them to be mere technicians.
The second is the over reliance on objectives as a tool of measurement.
This implies that behaviour change can be mechanistically and objectively measured and this brings about obvious dangers as there are questions of uncertainty on what is to be measured and the impact of particular experiences to behaviour change.
The curriculum planners have thus decided to breakdown experiences or skills learned into smaller units giving long lists of often trivial skills and competencies.
Because assessment is based on competence in each unit, all focus maybe put on this and the whole picture is neglected.
This type of assessment resembles a shopping list, whereby one is said to have attained learning when all units are ticked as passes. What is the impact and purpose of the learning, observers would want to know.
The other problem is that of teachers failing to achieve their objectives no matter how measurable they may appear.
No matter how much progression one may exhibit in the planning of one’s activity session, learning has been found to take place in its own time and so teachers are often criticised by academics on failure to achieve objectives.
Teacher educators in Zimbabwe are found focussing on checking on whether objectives were properly phrased and whether they had been achieved.
Questions like, “What are your objectives?” and, “Are they behavioural?” are often posed to teachers both in training and in practice. When has one’s behaviour ever been changed in one session?
Evaluation of behaviour change should use a holistic approach if it is to serve its purpose.
Because this curriculum approach is borrowed from the technological and industrial settings, it fails to cater for unanticipated results.
The focus on pre-specified learning outcomes may lead both learners and teachers to overlook what is resulting from their interactions, which, of course, is not listed as an objective. It should be realised that many scientific breakthroughs have been realised as researchers were searching for something else.
From our deduction, the greatest failure of this curriculum approach is that it fails to address where and how the skills experienced should be applied in real life.
In a country like ours, where industry is dwindling, it would be disastrous to have a skilled manpower base that has to wait for employment for it to be useful.
We take that if and when refined properly, this type of curriculum could be used in Zimbabwe.
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