Taba, Hilda

Hilda Taba (19021967) struggled to find the most effective way to create curriculum that would yield what she considered to be an educated populace; critical thinkers searching for meaning and understanding of the world around them and prepared to meet the challenges of a future that would be constantly changing. This struggle was not a top-down, externally created, and imposed curriculum package, but rather a process of developing curriculum from the bottom up by working with the classroom teachers delivering that curriculum to their students using instructional strategies that would further the goals of education in a democratic society. Taba's principles of curriculum can be easily implemented in any academic discipline or across disciplines as desired by the local school system. Taba's interests in the integration of objectives in the areas of content, skills, and attitudes as well as her inductive instructional strategies concept attainment and concept developmentto realize those objectives would be considered cutting-edge pedagogy today. Her concerns with what in her day was called “intergroup education,” currently known as multicultural education, as well as her interest in instructional strategies focused on minority, in those days, “culturally disadvan-taged,” or diverse students makes her an educator whose ideas are timely. Her interests in action research, in evaluation as crucial to the educational process and her belief that there is a need for qualitative as well as quantitative measurement in that evaluation process, reinforce the timeliness of her ideas as a curriculum theorist. For Taba, learning to think was the main goal, and balancing the curriculum to meet multiple needs was the path to attainment of the goal.

In 1935, Taba was invited by Ralph Tyler to join the Eight Year Study where she was put in charge of the team evaluating social sensitivity, a topic related to the goal of preparing students for effective democratic participation. This is an area not easily assessed by traditional pencil and paper tests because it concerns attitudes about class, race, and ethnicity generally seen in students' social lives rather than in academic preparation. Thus, the evaluation would need qualitative as well as quantitative measures.

As a result of this experience, a crucial part of any Taba curriculum plan became staff development working intensively, often in workshops, with teachers to assist them in understanding the concepts, ideas, and pedagogy necessary to implement the curriculum. Significantly, the first step was for the teachers to identify problems they were having in their classrooms with the curriculum or student learning. Everything flowed from the felt problems of the teachers with curriculum changes coming afterward as part of the solution to the teachers' problems. Taba believed that until teachers understood their curriculumwhat they were doing and why they were doing itno really effective student learning could take place. In other words, deep teacher understanding promotes student learning.

In 1944, as director of the Intergroup Education in Cooperating Schools project, Taba called for [Page 838]educators to develop their students' empathy toward diverse cultural perspectives while placing great emphasis on the power of critical intelligence and commondemocratic values in the fight against bigotry. Units of study would vary according to the needs of the students but the objective of prejudice reduction would remain constant. In many respects, this is an action research approach. The teachers identify felt problems with their own situationsclassroom, curricula, student learning, school, communityand seek to solve the problems. The evaluation of the success of the solutions new curriculum or pedagogyrequired new evaluation methods, similar to those in the social sensitivity study where qualitative changes in attitudes as well as accumulation of academic knowledge and skills were the ultimate goals.

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