Curriculum Implementation

Curriculum implementation is a many layered concept that originates in a seemingly straightforward problem of how to effect educational change by successfully installing a new curriculum. Typically, much political capital, subject area expertise, and design capabilities are expended in the development of a new curriculum. The resulting curriculum reflects both education traditions and some newly mandated public policy for schools. The implementation question often arrives as an afterthought of the curriculum development process and is framed, in the first instance, as an issue of communication: How are teachers to understand the new curriculum in a manner that is faithful to the intentions of the new curriculum?

Viewed simplistically in these terms, curriculum implementation becomes a matter of effective and efficient communication between the developers and teachers. The communication is one way; ideally, the developers try to convey the intentions of the new curriculum as clearly as possible by providing the necessary inservice education and supporting teaching resources, while the teachers expect detailed practical help and the necessary support materials to ensure successful implementation. Difficulties with communication are to be expected both in terms of inadequate support from the side of the developers and resistance to change, or poor professional development on the part of the teachers, but in principle these can be addressed through improved communication and practice.

This model of curriculum implementation as being essentially a problem of communication between producers and consumers of curriculum held sway in the curriculum field during the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, a flurry of research literature appeared reporting on the successes and failures of implementation efforts. These were followed by other publications—many by the same authors—that applied the findings to give advice on how to improve future educational change efforts. Historically, much of the original impetus for this flurry of research resulted from the 1975 RAND Change Agent Studies that reported the results of efforts to effect educational change through the ambitious national curriculum projects of the education decade, which had been inaugurated by the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s. Although the volume of curriculum writing that specifically addresses technical concerns with the mechanics of implementation has waned in the past several decades, a plentiful literature remains with respect to the associated topics of effecting institutional change and school improvement and teacher development.

During the 1980s, and influenced at least in part by curriculum reconceptualism, a movement began to reunderstand curriculum implementation critically and hermeneutically. Building upon Ernest House's 1979 critique of development and diffusion models of curriculum change and Egon Guba and David Clark's call to set aside unified systems views of curriculum and instruction, Ted Aoki called for a rethinking of curriculum implementation as situated praxis. The lived experience of teachers, Aoki has argued, is always an indwelling between the mandated curriculum (curriculum as plan) and the curriculum as lived with actual students, colleagues, and communities.

A hermeneutic interest in understanding curriculum implementation stands in sharp contrast with a technical interest in the management of change. Although curriculum research with a technical interest was concerned with understanding and ultimately controlling the processes of individual and organizational change occasioned by the introduction of a new curriculum, hermeneu-tics is concerned with understanding the event of change. Understood hermeneutically, implementation is marked by the arrival of a new curriculum that questions previously taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching. And although a new curriculum is not necessarily an unwelcome intrusion for teachers, its implementation is unavoidably an interpretative event. The RAND studies more or less confirmed this phenomenon after surveying 293 local adoptions of national curriculum projects in which they concluded mutual adaptation reflecting the implementation process.

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