Experienced Curriculum

The experienced curriculum refers to how the child responds to, engages with, or learns from the events, people, materials, and social or emotional environment of the classroom. The concept of experienced curriculum is not synonymous with either child-centered curriculum or teacher-centered curriculum. Consideration of the experienced curriculum as a measure for student learning requires that the holistic, experienced meaning that classroom participation has for children is determined and then evaluated against the significance of that experience in terms of its educational value.

The experienced curriculum may be influenced by, but is not necessarily aligned with, the planned or intended curriculum as designed by the teacher or imposed by other external forces. It differs from other levels of curriculum (including mandated, formal, and operational) because it focuses on the students' actual learning and is not assessed by an objective or standardized test score. The experienced curriculum is affected not only by the planned curriculum, but is also greatly impacted by the physical surroundings of the classroom, the interpersonal behaviors of the other students, the teacher, and so on. It constitutes the child's holistic response to classroom events during any given teaching episode. What the child experiences emerges from his or her personal and academic background, personality, disposition, needs, purposes, and intellectual capability in relationship to what is available within the event.

The experienced curriculum can be difficult to observe. Just watching a child may or may not tell the observer what learning is occurring within the mind as a result of the teaching. Further, asking children what they learned is fraught with [Page 362]difficulty because their responses may not reveal the actual depth or accuracy of all they learned. Planning for or controlling what students experience during the teaching and learning periods of the day is even more challenging. No matter how carefully constructed the curriculum is, it is the children who interpret the curriculum and the content they are engaging in. Furthermore, classrooms are interactive spaces where multiple learners with a variety of backgrounds and interests simultaneously engage in the planned experiences. Thus, in spite of all preparations the teacher makes to adhere to curriculum mandates, the learners have control over interpreting the inputs they receive.

Attention to the experienced curriculum as a measure of learning allows educators to account for the emotional and social as well as the intellectual growth of the child. Awareness of students' experiences within a curriculum provides educators insight into those occasions when students' engagement and satisfaction with subject matter or classroom learning activities converges or diverges from the intended learning curriculum. The concept of the experienced curriculum, as a measure of life in classrooms, draws educators' attention to how and what children are learning. It asks that educators consider the child's experience rather than scores on achievement tests as the most important indicator of the quality of classroom instruction.

In exploring the roots of the experienced curriculum concept, John Dewey's thinking about the value and centrality of the child's experience in the learning process is visible. Joseph Schwab's practical and curricular commonplaces—teacher, student, content, and cultural milieu—are also evident. Most prominent is John Goodlad's model of curriculum inquiry. In this model he begins with society's identification of what knowledge is of worth, moves through national, state, and local mandates for educational goals and objectives, to teachers' instructional objectives and classroom plans. Juxtaposed against more formal representations of curriculum, Goodlad calls attention to the child's experience with that curriculum as the most vital indicator of its success. An ongoing concern with using the experienced curriculum as a measure of student learning continues to be how to adequately and accurately uncover and evaluate all that the child learns within and beyond the intended curriculum.

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