The Guide to Curriculum in Education illuminates how four commonplaces of curriculum--subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu--are interdependent and interconnected in curriculum making and the ties between and controversies over public debate, policy making, university scholarship, and school practice in defining and developing curricula. Complex traditions of curriculum scholarship are traced to illuminate curriculum ideas, issues, perspectives, and possibilities. A major goal is to highlight and explicate how subject matter, teachers, learners, and context or environment are interdependent and interconnected in decision-making processes that involve local and state school boards and government agencies, educational institutions, and curriculum stakeholders at all levels. Key Features: • Organized around four parts as articulated by curriculum scholar Joseph J. Schwab: subject matter, teachers, learners, and milieu • Brief, objective chapters of 5,000 words each provide student readers with more depth than found in an encyclopedia entry • Chapters focus on key contemporary concerns and provide Further Reading suggestions for students wishing to explore a topic in more detail • The Guide focuses on 55 topical chapters organized in four parts: Subject Matter as Curriculum, Teachers as Curriculum, Students as Curriculum, and Milieu as Curriculum This guide will serve as a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers within education programs who seek to better understand the four commonplaces of curriculum and how it influences various aspects within the field of education.

Subject Matter as Experience

Subject Matter as Experience

Subject matter as experience
Thomas P. ThomasPeter B. Hilton

The orientation of subject matter as experience is a central feature of the progressive education movement as well as other alternative approaches to conventional schooling. By positioning life experience as the organizing principle of the curriculum, traditional academic subjects (e.g., mathematics, history, biology) are subordinated to selected practical experiences. The curriculum is revised to focus on “education of, by, and for experience” (Dewey, 1938, p. 28), derived from intelligent human living, well suited to the particular setting of an assembled group of young people under the guidance of an informed adult. It is contended that by focusing on problematic experiences, education is intrinsically motivating, interactive, relevant, and empowering.

An experience-based curriculum is intrinsically motivating ...

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