Fundamentals of Curriculum Development

First published in 1950 and then revised in 1957, the synoptic curriculum text, Fundamentals of Curriculum Development, by B. Othanel Smith, William O. Stanley, and J. Harlan Shores set the standard for synoptic texts of the 1950s. The conceptualization provided by these authors influenced scholarship on curriculum development for the 1950s, the 1960s, and well into the 1970s. It was influenced by earlier texts by Franklin Bobbitt, W. W. Charters, Henry Harap, L. Thomas Hopkins, and Alice Miel and especially by synoptic texts by Hollis Caswell and Doak Campbell, Harold Alberty, and Florence Stratemeyer (and colleagues). It influenced synoptic texts for at least four decades by many authors, including J. Galen Saylor and William M. Alexander, Hilda Taba, Daniel and Laurel Tanner, Elliot W. Eisner, and William H. Schubert. In addition, it elaborated greatly on the highly influential, succinct, empirical–analytic framework outlined by Ralph W. Tyler.

Growing from a breadth and depth of involvement in social foundations of education, Smith, Stanley, and Shores christened the first section of their treatise as social diagnosis as a salient prerequisite body of knowledge for curriculum development. This body included understanding meanings and structures of culture and cultural change. Derived from roots in the philosophy of John Dewey, they showed that meaningful curriculum development must be situated in community change. Although this involved a grassroots perspective, they also argued that curriculum development must be seen simultaneously in terms of large-scale societal values. Thus, curriculum development was held to be a social process needing extensive social perspective.

The second and third sections of Fundamentals of Curriculum Development related closely to the analytic framework of principles of curriculum and instruction that Tyler devised in 1949: purposes, selection of content or learning experiences, and organization. In doing so, they analyzed principles for the validation of objectives (i.e., social adequacy, human needs, democratic ideals, consistency and noncontradiction, and behavioristic interpretation). These were treated as criteria for the selection of values. They expanded the use of criteria and principles to subject matter selection and differentiated carefully among four procedures of determining selection: judgmental, experiential, analytical, and consensual. Principles, criteria, and procedures were carried into considerations of sequence and course placement, as well as allotment and distribution of instructional time. Four major patterns of curriculum that vied for supremacy in the 1950s, as well as before and after, were elaborated in terms of chief characteristics, problems, practices, and criticisms: the subject curriculum, the activity curriculum, and the core curriculum.

Part 4 introduced a new consideration seldom treated in curriculum development before, except by Miel in the late 1940s and early 1950s: human relations. Under this topic such subtopics as educational engineering, curriculum change, and action research were introduced systematically. Much was built upon change theory of field psychologist Kurt Lewin and his method of considering gatekeepers vis-à-vis change and the use of force field analysis to deal with supportive and resistive forces in a situation to be changed. Substantial emphasis in this process was devoted to personnel, school–community relations, faculty morale, and their place in selecting, initiating, and sustaining change.

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