Session Information
03 SES 02 A, Relevance of the Curriculum and Students' Future Vocational Pathways
Paper Session
Contribution
A previous paper (Sousa and Silva, 2009) reported some findings from an action research project, entitled “Researching for a Relevant Curriculum”, which has been conducted in the Azores, Portugal, with the aim of responding to some concerns that teachers of basic education have expressed with regard to some students’ lack of interest in learning what educational authorities want them to learn. In order to address that problem, an action research team, which includes teachers of basic education and a university professor, formulated the hypothesis that the above-mentioned lack of interest is related to the existence of problems of relevance in the curriculum. Accordingly, the following objectives were established: - To identify causes of the alleged lack of interest shown by given students with regard to the curriculum in general or to specific parts of it; - To understand the extent to which different students consider the curriculum in general or specific kinds of it relevant; - To relate the degree of relevance that different students assign to given content to ways of presenting that same content; - To contribute to the development of reflective practice in the selection of content and in the design of teaching methods; - To contribute to the development of teaching methods that lead to learning that is acknowledged by students as relevant. In the Fall of 2009 the above-mentioned action research team started working with a team from Bucharest, with similar characteristics, in order to pursue the same objectives in the context of an international partnership. In this presentation the authors will discuss findings from a new cycle of action research conducted by the Portuguese team and the first findings obtained by the Romanian team. The theoretical framework of this research is based on a body of literature that critically examines “school culture”, defined as “the knowledge and content chosen, from the wider field of general culture, to be taught in our schools” (Esteve, 2000, p. 7). As Apple (1990) states, “the overt and covert knowledge found within school settings, and the principles of selection, organization, and evaluation of this knowledge, are value-governed selections from a much larger universe of possible knowledge and selection principles” (p. 45). By making their choices, curriculum decision makers do not just decide what is supposed to be learnt. They also indirectly establish different distances between what should be learnt and different students. Therefore, in order to make the curriculum relevant from the pupils’ point of view, teachers have to reconstruct it critically, instead of taking it as a “given” (Goodson, 1994). Otherwise, teachers will risk presenting content that “bears absolutely no relation to reality that could enable it to survive in the student’s mind” (Esteve, 2000, p. 9). This theoretical framework has helped the action research teams interpret the calls for competency-based curricula that have been made by European policy makers (Eurydice, 2002) and theoretically legitimated by outstanding researchers like Le Boterf (1994) and Perrenoud (1998).
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Apple, M. (1990). Ideology and curriculum (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Esteve, J. M. (2000). Culture in the school: Assessment and the content of education. European Journal of Teacher Education, 23(1), 5-18. Eurydice (2002). Key competencies: A developing concept in general compulsory education. Brussels: Eurydice European Unit. Fraser, S., et al. (2004) (Eds.), Doing research with chidren and young people London: SAGE. Goodson, I. (1994). Studying curriculum: Cases and methods. New York: Teachers College Press. Le Boterf, G. (1994) De la compétence. Essai sur un attracteur étrange, Paris, Les Éditions d’organisation. Lewis, A., & Lindsay, G. (2000): Researching children's perspectives. Buckingham. Open University Press. Perrenoud, P. (1998). La transposition didactique à partir de pratiques: Des savoirs aux compétences. Revue des Sciences de l’Éducation, XXIV (3), 487-514. Sousa, F. and Silva, F. (2009). Towards a relevant curriculum: Recent outcomes from an action research project. Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, Vienna (Austria).
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