Designing curricula is in itself a predicate of change, since it offers the opportunity to reflect on past practice and assumptions, usually through the stimuli of student and staff feedback on the one hand, and research-generated change on the other. At the same time, because it is essential to conceive of the student as active participant, curricula need to be designed with the desiderata that the students following the curriculum should be stimulated by it. For some, or perhaps now only a benighted few, curriculum design is an odd, new concept. Believing that the values of the subject are sacrosanct and should therefore remain undisturbed, they might prefer, therefore, to teach the subject as a reified object (rather than a field of human activity), regardless of its context (an insistence, in other words, on teaching the subject rather than the students). Quite apart from this being an indefensible stance in the face of cultural and intellectual change, it is pedagogically irresponsible in its denial of the need to recognise the student and the contextualisa- tion of student learning. Curricula in the arts, humanities and social sciences have a wide variation, for the scope of study is enormous. First, there are the conventional subdivisions within the conventional disciplines, which include cultural and period divisions, there are also subdisciplines (e.g. within language and linguistics), and in the practical arts, divisions of genre (e.g. drawing, performance, painting, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics). Second, there are interdisciplinary areas, some growing out of marriages between subjects (e.g. literature and history); others the result of relatively recent political, social or technological/cultural developments (gender studies on the one hand, media studies on the other); yet more that derive from theoretical challenges to conventionally conceived areas (there are, for example, many people working within the broad province of ‘English’ who will see themselves, primarily, as cultural historians, or cultural critics). Third, there are new, distinct areas growing out of more conventional regions of practice: thus visual culture is developing out of media and cultural studies on the one hand, and art history on the other; creative writing is developing out of English, Arts, humanities and social sciences ❘ 305
and even as it does so, it is cross-fertilising with journalism, and script-writing from performance or film studies programmes. Although change is a constant condition of arts, humanities and social sciences, the pace of change is faster than ever before in this growing fluidity, this proliferation of cusps between subjects, as well as in the emergence of powerful new areas. Alternatively, the current context of change may be read less positively as a dissolution of the disciplines (Barnett, 1994: 126–39).
The first question confronting us when we begin curriculum design is that of situating our programme within this intellectual ferment, and although the prospect of marking out such territory is exciting, it also has to be done with the utmost care, to ensure that our own enthusiasm for exploration does not result in chaos or confusion for the students.
Potentially good programmes can be easily marred by the unconscious displacement of academics’ intellectual enthusiasms, or crises, into the student experience.
So, marking out the territory is an essential first stage, but this must be done concurrently with an understanding of the student body, and a conceptualisation of what the whole programme may add up to. This, again, is challenging. There is a huge diversity in student intake nationally in these areas, and in some cases this diversity has almost as great a range in individual institutions. Academics now teach mixed-ability classes more than they ever used to, and all the signs are that this will continue and spread – even to institutions long accustomed to accepting only very highly qualified A level candidates.
The implications for teaching and learning in general are considerable, but there are also very particular implications for curriculum design. Without a doubt, it is most usually the first level of a programme that deservedly receives the most attention in all curriculum design activities. Most academics have a clear idea about where they want their students to be upon completion of the degree, and their understanding of their discipline is such that they are confident about how a graduate in that discipline should be defined. Much less certainty now attends the understanding of how undergraduates should begin their degrees, and the reasons for this are manifold. First, the threshold of students’ knowledge and abilities is no longer assumed to be stable or held in common (Haslem, 1998: 117–18).
Second, every department will have its own understanding of the foundational experience required by the students. Third, institutional infrastructures and structures – and particularly those determined by modular schemes – would exert a strong logistical influence over what is possible. Each of these is addressed in turn below.
306 ❘ Teaching in the disciplines
Interrogating practice
To what extent do you understand your subject as a practice whose borders are defined by particular disciplinary procedures? What do you think students expect of the subject, and how would you explain to them its coherence and/or its interdisciplinary connections?
Students’ threshold knowledge and ability
The majority of students in these disciplines will be coming from a school or college experience with a highly structured learning environment, which apportions tasks and assessments in a phased programme of learning. Others will be coming from access courses, or the equivalent, which are traditionally more intimate learning environments in which peer and tutor support are key elements. In addition, most of them will be impelled to follow disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences not as a means to a specific end, but because they have elected for an education of personal development which marks them out as an individual, and not simply as a consumer of knowledge and skills. In this education, pleasure and satisfaction, those orphans of a utilitarian educational policy, are essential motivators, and they will have been developed in, and practised by, the students in many different curriculum contexts. Here, then, is a series of challenges for the curriculum designer: the students will find themselves in a learning environment that treats them as independent learners expected to construct, for the most part, their own particular interests and responses within the broad remit of their modules;
they will find themselves less supported by peers or schooling; they will be seeking, amidst this, to sustain and develop further the pleasures and satisfaction that probably governed their choice of degree. All the time, during the first year, they will want to know how they are doing; their lecturers, in the meantime, will be concerned to know much the same thing, perhaps from another perspective. Feedback, therefore, is all-important, and is a vital agency to be used in the complex acculturation of the student in the early stages of higher education, where the new cultural forces at play are particularly volatile (see Barnett, 1990: 95–109).
Each department, ideally, will be agreed on how their students should develop in the first level of their study. Most will want to be assured that, whatever the students’ prior experience, they will be well prepared for the second and third levels of their degrees, and able to choose an appropriate and coherent pattern of study where choice is an option.
For most academics in these disciplines, the design of the early stages of the curriculum should be governed by the need to achieve an optimum balance between a grounding in knowledge and the establishment of the necessary tools of analysis, including the acquisition of a critical, theoretical or analytical vocabulary.
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Interrogating practice
How can curricula be designed so as to serve the needs of students and tutors in monitoring progress in the early stages? What are the best practical means of providing feedback to students that will allow them to identify strengths and weaknesses?
Grounding is important for the students’ future location of their own work within the broad map; tools of analysis provide the essential means by which students can define themselves confidently as active learners, since the primary materials (texts, documents, data) are converted from an inert condition into the constituents of new meanings and ideas through the students’ own work. Precisely how either area is designed will be determined by the particular programme’s character and purpose, which may range from the highly theoretical through to the pragmatic. What is essential here is that this character, or philosophy, should be clearly visible to the student, and not something that he or she is left to work out through arbitrary encounters with tutors of different preferences.
Most universities and colleges now work under the pressure of a system in which space in their buildings and infrastructure is measured and accounted for in relation to student numbers and activities. In addition, a great many universities and colleges run modular schemes which offer student choice both within and across discipline areas. These common features have large and different effects on the teaching and learning of subject disciplines that should be acknowledged, and taken into account at the point of curriculum design: what it is that can be studied cannot be divorced from how it will be taught, and that, in turn, depends on the availability of resources and time. A curriculum designer may, for excellent reasons, require four-hour blocks of time only to discover that a modular timetable prohibits this; similarly, rooms where small groups of students can work in pairs or fours with adequate facilities may not be available. A further com- plication for the disciplines is that many degree structures now require or encourage students to explore a wide discipline base in their first year, thus minimising the time available for the foundational phase. Such structures have (probably unbeknown to themselves) produced a graphic template for curriculum design within the disciplines that is an inverted pyramid, with students’ subject experience growing from a narrow base to a broad tip across the three years of their degree.
Foundational experience
Having explored these three critical elements impacting upon the start of students’
studies, we can recombine them into a composite picture, and then develop this across the extent of the degree programme. Where students are studying a combination of subjects (and very large numbers of students are in these disciplines, particularly during the first year, or level), the inverted pyramid, or its near equivalent, is the key factor to be addressed, since it means that there is only a small proportion of the students’ total study time available for the foundational phase in each subject. And in the arts, humanities and social sciences this foundational phase is commonly understood to be, of necessity, rich in content. Students studying English will usually be introduced to a range of genres, and some historical contexts, as well as methods of understanding; students of history will explore a range of periods and locations, or one rich period in depth, so as to maximise understanding of the different kinds of historical analysis, as well as comprehending the nature of sources, and historiography. Students of the practical arts will have an 308 ❘ Teaching in the disciplines
equivalent need to understand such breadth through their own practice (although the nature of such programmes usually means that their students have progressed somewhat further with this experience because of the benefit of the extra year provided by their foundation year, or its equivalent in access courses). Since this foundation is already compressed by the need to maximise feedback and concurrently build both knowledge and tools of analysis, curriculum designers are commonly forced into some hard, discretionary thinking that will focus on identifying essential components. In these subjects, such a phase is likely to have a broad and representative content rather than a narrow one, in order to allow the student sufficient introduction to the variety and kinds of materials to be discovered later in more depth. At the same time, a broad content will also provide sufficient range for the introduction of the different modes of analysis that will be refined as the students progress.
For a great many departments, discretionary thinking comes down to difficult and practical choices. What can be achieved within the established resource? Can the resource (between the three levels of the student experience) be redistributed? Should first-year students receive more, intensive teaching, since so little time is available in which so much needs to be established?
These questions have an added urgency for those departments that are offering an undifferentiated second stage (that is to say where modules are not designated by progression at levels 2 and 3, but are offered to all students at both levels). Here, even more pressure is exerted on the first stage, since students will progress into classes in which the expectations attached to second-year full-time students will be the same as those in their third year. Where the curriculum designer is faced with a differentiated system at levels 2 and 3, however, there is an opportunity, and in the case of a steeply angled inverted pyramid structure, possibly an imperative, to push introductory work up into the second level.
Institutional infrastructure and levels
Levels are therefore useful devices for curriculum designers attempting to plot carefully student progression. Three levels will reduce the intense pressure of the first-level experience; they may also allow a steady gradient of assessment tasks to be plotted similarly, to allow, for instance, the nurturing of independent research skills, or the Arts, humanities and social sciences ❘ 309
Interrogating practice
If the foundational phase of the programme is broad based, what are the implications for work at the subsequent levels in your discipline? Conversely, if it is narrow (part of the inverted pyramid), what are the implications?
training required for oral assessments and presentations. Without levels, such diversity is not always possible, since there can be no acknowledgement of a stage in which some carefully accounted risk can be attached to the development of new techniques, which will then, in turn, be assessed when the student is properly prepared. Although there are doubtless imaginative ways around this, undifferentiated systems tend to be conservative in assessment styles, honing very high levels of abilities in specific areas, and founded upon a homogeneous student body, usually very highly qualified.
There is resistance to progressive-level structures in these disciplines in some quarters which stems from the essential nature of learning that they share, described at the beginning of this chapter. Since we are dealing here with content-laden bodies of knowledge, whose division into manageable portions is to a certain extent arbitrary, or conceptual, and not based on a linear knowledge pattern in which one stage necessarily predicates another, then levels are not, specifically, appropriate. Once a foundation has been established, there is no reason to suppose (for example) that the study of Picasso is intrinsically any more difficult than the study of Turner, or that the study of postcolonial ideologies is any more difficult than the study of medieval theology. While some credence would be attributed to the notion that some primary materials are more difficult, or less accessible, than some others, this does not immediately convert into the assumption that they might be, intrinsically, third-level subjects. Academics in these subjects therefore have strong intellectual grounds for their resistance to models of learning which derive from content rigidly ordered by standard prerequisites.