Spiral Curriculum

The spiral curriculum is a key feature of the curriculum design process popularized through Jerome Bruner's post-Sputnik classic, The Process of Education. Although John Dewey wrote of a similar principle, his notion of spiraling focused on the learner's experience and the interrelated-ness of all areas of knowledge. In contrast, Bruner based his spiral in the structure of separate academic disciplines as provided by university scholars. A central notion was that basic principles in any discipline can be represented in some intellectually honest form to even very young children and that this process would build in the readiness for them to engage in later and progressively more complex presentations of the principles. Writing in 1960, Bruner emphasized the advantage of teaching structural principles because of the recent explosion of new knowledge to include in the curriculum, especially in the sciences. Amid the nearly hysterical atmosphere of the cold war and the flood of government money that accompanied it, acceptance of this discipline-based approach mushroomed, making it the model for national curriculum reform for nearly a decade. Although a variety of circumstances dampened enthusiasm for the model by the end of the 1960s, it helped establish the hegemony of disciplinarity among other concerns of curriculum design.

Bruner's ideas were first published as a report on the Woods Hole Conference of 1959, a meeting attended primarily by scientists, mathematicians, and psychologists. Their conclusions, as interpreted by Bruner, established several themes to guide curriculum work. Bruner believed the first twounderstanding new concepts as part of the overall structure of a discipline and discovery learningled naturally to the third, the spiral curriculum. For example, in the overall structure of algebra, “balance” is a key concept. A spiral curriculum might take advantage of young children's intuitive understanding of the concept through discovery lessons using toys such as teeter-totters, then circle back to the concept later using various forms of levers, and eventually provide for the discovery of the meaning of relationships expressed in abstract algebraic equations.

Bruner, a cognitive psychologist, believed like many curriculum scholars that education should lead to understanding, not mere performance, and that this goal was best achieved through discovery learning. However, as he noted in The Process of Education, psychologists had neglected the study of curriculum problems for most of the 20th century. [Page 809]That, plus the exclusion of curriculum professors and teachers from the Woods Hole conference, added up to his failure to sufficiently address long-established concerns of curriculum scholarship, such as the goal of democratic citizenship, the nature of the individual student, and relevance of the curriculum to the learner's life. Bruner's proposal treated all students as miniature scholar-specialists. He later admitted that one mistaken assumption of the discipline-centered reforms may have been that students would be as excited about mastering the curriculum as the disciplinary specialists had been about constructing it. He also noted his failure to consider elements of the context of learning, especially culture.

Other weaknesses aided in the model's demise as the reigning curriculum model of the post-Sputnik era. Scholars within a discipline could not always agree on its structure. Others felt there was a tendency to impose methods of curriculum development for the sciences on all subject areas on the assumption that all disciplines had similar structures. The fact that university scholars with little or no public school experience were creating curricula sometimes led to misuse or rejection of their products by teachers. When politicians of the mid-1960s called for evaluation studies of federally funded curriculum reform, the results undermined confidence in top-down programs created with no teacher input, further eroding the model's popularity.

...