Curriculum Construction

W. W. Charters's Curriculum Construction was among a handful of books that pioneered the emerging field of curriculum studies during the first few decades of the 20th century. Curriculum Construction became popular with advocates of vocational training and others who were seeking to establish an empirical basis for professions ranging from nursing to teaching to pharmacy. Charters completed his PhD degree in education at [Page 198]the University of Chicago in 1904 where John Dewey supervised his dissertation. He later served as a professor of education and educational researcher at numerous universities, including the University of Missouri, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Chicago, and Ohio State University. In Curriculum Construction, Charters applied the new social science techniques that were sweeping fields such as economics and political science to the field of curriculum.

A thoroughgoing advocate of evolutionary theory and specialized training for occupations, Charters was part of the larger progressive education movement that held considerable power during the 1910s and 1920s. Throughout Curriculum Construction, Charters argues against the traditional view that curriculum should be rooted in the conventional subject matter disciplines. Instead, he argues that curriculum should be tied to the various occupations and adult activities that citizens perform during their daily lives. Subjects are only as good as they help us to complete our daily activities more efficiently. Like his one-time University of Chicago colleague John Franklin Bobbitt, Charters was a strong advocate of vocational training in K–12 schools and in universities. Charters argues that curriculum development should begin with activity analysis, which involves the exhaustive study of adult activities in order to create curriculum content. The empirically based plan for activity analysis that Charters describes in Curriculum Construction was used in dozens of professional fields, including nursing, pharmacy, and construction. Charters himself applied his system of activity analysis to the profession of teaching in a major study called the Commonwealth Teacher Training Study, which was funded by the Commonwealth Fund. The study resulted in the publication of a book, The Commonwealth Teacher-Training Study, that includes “Master List of 1001 Teacher Traits.” Charters argues that these traits, which were based upon the system that he outlines in Curriculum Construction, should become the basis for teacher training curriculum throughout the country.

Curriculum Construction is divided into two parts. The first includes a detailed description of Charters's method of curriculum development and planning. He discusses the role of ideals in curriculum making, how to analyze activities to determine their most essential components, and how to determine the relative importance of different pieces of curriculum content. To increase his audience and the influence of the book, Charters included examples that relate to elementary schools, high schools, and universities. In part two, Charters draws upon the work of curriculum specialists and practitioners, for example superintendents, to describe the best methods for creating curriculum in the various subject matter fields. He includes separate sections on the subjects of mathematics, language, history, geography, vocational training, and spelling. Charters's goal with the second part of the book was to provide curriculum developers with the best techniques available for creating curriculum in these various fields.

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