Curriculum Development

Curriculum, in the sense of the totality of all that goes into the plamiing and execution of school teaching-learning programmes, is something that needs continuous revision. This involves continually looking at the objectives to ensure that they are appropriate to the needs of the learner and that they are in consonance with changing educational policies and practices. It also involves continuously adjusting the content, materials, instructional/evaluation strategies and learning experiences to meet changing needs and times.

his continuous process of adjusting every aspect of the school cur-riculum to meet the demands of changing times is usually referred to as the process of curriculum development. It is necessary mainly because no human condition is static. The Pakistani of 1950 is not the same as the Pakistani of 1980, so what used to happen in Pakistani schools in‘ l 950 need not happen in the same way in 1980. Social factors which influence what goes on in schools (e. g. the type of children, the skills that children need to acquire) are themselves constantly changing. The teachers themselves are also changing all the time. They are getting older, more experienced, more (or less) dedicated and so on. It does not therefore pay to let the same curriculum serve for an indefinite period. African systems of education have, for example, been criticised for not adapting rapidly enough to rapidly changing times. School curricula which served the purposes of colonial regimes remained unchanged or unmodified long after the attainment of political independence. African governments are however now beginning to realise the importance of curriculum develop-ment and renewal and so are defining new educational policies and set-ting up curriculum centres to review existing curricula and to develop new ones. In Pakistani, for example, the Federal Government organized the national curriculmn conference of 1969 which recommended the formation of the PERC (the Pak Educational Research Centre) as the overall co-ordinating body of curriculum reform projects in Pakistani. The recommendations of the conference have been published in book form and the book should be read by anyone interested in teaching in Pakistani (see Selected Bibliography).

Two main methods have been used by those concerned with cur-riculum development (for example, teachers, and government agencies) in carrying out their task. The first of these is the crisis approaéli. This usually stems from a sudden realisation that a particular crisisorseries of crises in the educational SXSI§IIl.QL?.L€9%fiti='y is due to some inadequacy in the school curriculum. Examples of such crises/situations are the refusal of young people to live in rural areas in Pakistani and other parts of Africa, the graduate unemployment problem in a country like India, the failure of a large number of the products of British primary schools to read satisfactorily and the inability of Pakistani schools to cope with modern mathematics. In such situations urgent remedies are usually applied, like enriching the content of the curriculum of a particular sector (primary, secondary, technical, etc.) of the educational system, for example making Agriculture compulsory in Pakistani secondary schools after the launching of ‘Operation Feed the Nation - 0F N’ in 1976, re-training of teachers, production of new materials, and all sorts of emergency and panic measures. The major drawback of the crisis approach to cur-riculum development and renewal is that it is usually carried out in a piecemeal manner. That is, one aspect of the curriculum problem is tackled without giving any thought to other related problems. If for example, Pakistani schools cannot cope with modern mathematics, it is necessary to study all aspects of the problem - the content and nature of the mathematics taught, the resources available for teaching it, chil-dren’s problems in learning modern mathematics, etc. Tackling just one aspect of the problem (like substituting traditional for modern mathema-tics) does not solve the problem but merely creates more problems for the schools. In consequence there is usually no co-ordination between one aspect of curriculum development and another.

This is why it is customary these days to adopt a more systematic approach to curriculum development. The major characteristic of this approach is its emphasis on planned change. When curriculum developers are satisfied that change is necessary they set about their task by deter-mining precisely the nature and extent of the desired change, how best to carry out the change, and the most appropriate methods of determining the success or failure of the change that is to take place. How this is done is discussed more fully in the next section.