Alberty, Harold

Harold Alberty (18901971), professor of education at the Ohio State University, had a remarkable career that spanned the progressive education movement in the United States as well as the neo-progressive curricular practices that emerged toward the end of his life in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Alberty profoundly influenced the field of curriculum studies through his most widely cited text, Reorganizing the High School Curriculum. In his book, Alberty described curriculum integration across a continuum that illustrated how content knowledge can be organized to achieve more or less integration of major concepts, skills, beliefs, and so on. Although some scholars suggest that there were six types of curriculum integration in Alberty's model, the preponderance of curriculum theorists describe five major types ranging from the least integrative to the most integrative.

The Type One design was the separate subjects approach in which content was dispersed into cur-ricular “silos” that had little, if any, relationship with other content areas. This was essentially the model for the high school curriculum envisioned by the Committee of Ten in 1898 and was largely driven by the traditional disciplinary structure of colleges and universities. This design was based on separate courses (algebra, chemistry, Spanish, U.S. literature, U.S. history) that students took in a segmented, fragmented structure. The Type Two design, which has been labeled as a correlated curriculum, provided the opportunity for teachers to temporarily integrate two distinct courses, usually by creating [Page 24]teaching units that linked, for example, U.S. literature and U.S. history by having students read The Grapes of Wrath in U.S. literature class while studying the Depression in U.S. history. Each teacher taught separately but planned their units jointly.

The Type Three design became known as the fusion model because courses were actually created that permanently connected two or more separate subjects. So, botany and zoology became biology; geography and geology became earth science; history, economics, political science, and geography became social studies; English, speech, and drama became language arts; and so on. Content could also be fused through thematic units within these courses by connecting language arts and social studies, math and science, social studies and science, and so forth, through thematic blocks covering the entire morning, afternoon, or full day. The Type Four and Type Five designs constituted the “core curriculum” either in a preplanned core that was focused on common societal problems (e.g., war, pollution, global warming, terrorism) or problems that adolescents would frequently experience as part of their developmental cycle. The Type Five design was considerably more student centered than the Type Four design, which was problem based. The Type Five design allowed teachers and students to cooperatively plan the student's learning experiences by using learning contracts or similar types of negotiated agreements.

Although Alberty's model for reorganizing general education was targeted to the high school curriculum, his greater influence may have been on the postsecondary curriculum and the middle school curriculum that emerged in the 1960s. Certainly, the middle school curriculum model created by Gordon Vars and John Lounsbury drew heavily from Alberty's concept of the general education core curriculum, and many colleges and universities make frequent reference to their general education “core” classes although their use of the term core differs from Alberty's original concept. Many agree that Alberty's views on curriculum design, democratic education, curriculum integration, and the core curriculum are still relevant and are still central to the study of curriculum development at all levels.

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