Curriculum

In education, a curriculum is the totality of student experiences that occur in an educational process. The term often refers specifically to a planned sequence of instruction, or to a view of the student's experiences in terms of the educator's or school's instructional goals. A curriculum may incorporate the planned interaction of pupils with instructional content, materials, resources, and processes for evaluating the attainment of educational objectives. Curricula are split into several categories: the explicit, the implicit, the excluded, and the extracurricular.
Curricula may be tightly standardized or may include a high level of instructor or learner autonomy. Many countries have national curricula in primary and secondary education, such as the United Kingdom's National Curriculum.
UNESCO's International Bureau of Education has the primary mission of studying curricula and their implementation worldwide.

Etymology

The word "curriculum" began as a Latin word which means "a race" or "the course of a race". The word is "from a Modern Latin transferred use of classical Latin curriculum "a running, course, career", from currere "to run"." The first known use in an educational context is in the Professio Regia, a work by University of Paris professor Petrus Ramus published posthumously in 1576. The term subsequently appears in University of Leiden records in 1582. The word's origins appear closely linked to the Calvinist desire to bring greater order to education.
By the seventeenth century, the University of Glasgow also referred to its "course" of study as a "curriculum", producing the first known use of the term in English in 1633. By the nineteenth century, European universities routinely referred to their curriculum to describe both the complete course of study and particular courses and their content. By 1824, the word was defined as "a course, especially a fixed course of study at a college, university, or school."

Definitions and interpretations

Professional interpretations

There is no generally agreed upon definition of curriculum. There various definitions that describe the term.
Through the work of Dewey, Kelly, Smith, and Eisner, four types of curricula could be defined as:

Explicit curriculum: subjects that will be taught, the identified "mission" of the school, and the knowledge and skills that the school expects successful students to acquire.
Implicit curriculum: lessons that arise from the culture of the school and the behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that characterize that culture, the unintended curriculum.
Hidden curriculum: things which students learn, 'because of the way in which the work of the school is planned and organized but which are not in themselves overtly included in the planning or even in the consciousness of those responsible for the school arrangements. The term itself is attributed to Philip W. Jackson and is not always meant to be a negative. Hidden curriculum, if its potential is realized, could benefit students and learners in all educational systems. Also, it does not just include the physical environment of the school, but the relationships formed or not formed between students and other students or even students and teachers.
Excluded curriculum or null curriculum: topics or perspectives that are excluded from the curriculum.

It may also come in the form of extracurricular activities. This may include school-sponsored programs, which are intended to supplement the academic aspect of the school experience or community-based programs and activities. Examples of school-sponsored extracurricular programs include sports, academic clubs, and performing arts. Community-based programs and activities may take place at a school after hours but are not linked directly to the school. Community-based programs frequently expand on the curriculum that was introduced in the classroom. For instance, students may be introduced to environmental conservation in the classroom. This knowledge is further developed through a community-based program. Participants then act on what they know with a conservation project. Community-based extracurricular activities may include "environmental clubs, 4-H, boy/girl scouts, and religious groups".
Kerr defines curriculum as "all the learning which is planned and guided by the school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside of school."
Braslavsky states that curriculum is an agreement among communities, educational professionals, and the State on what learners should take on during specific periods of their lives. Furthermore, the curriculum defines "why, what, when, where, how, and with whom to learn."
Smith says that, " syllabus will not generally indicate the relative importance of its topics or the order in which they are to be studied. Where people still equate curriculum with a syllabus they are likely to limit their planning to a consideration of the content or the body of knowledge that they wish to transmit."
According to Smith, a curriculum can be ordered into a procedure:

Types of curricula

Under some definitions, curriculum is prescriptive, and is based on a more general syllabus which merely specifies what topics must be understood and to what level to achieve a particular grade or standard.
A curriculum may also refer to a defined and prescribed course of studies, which students must fulfill in order to pass a certain level of education. For example, an elementary school might discuss how its curricula is designed to improve national testing scores or help students learn fundamental skills. An individual teacher might also refer to his or her curriculum, meaning all the subjects that will be taught during a school year. The courses are arranged in a sequence to make learning a subject easier. In schools, a curriculum spans several grades.
On the other hand, a high school might refer to their curricula as the courses required in order to receive one's diploma. They might also refer to it in exactly the same way as an elementary school and use it to mean both individual courses needed to pass as well as the overall offering of courses, which help prepare a student for life after high school.
A curriculum can be seen from different perspectives. What societies envisage as important teaching and learning constitutes the "intended" curriculum. Since it is usually presented in official documents, it may be also called the "written" or "official" curriculum. However, at a classroom level this intended curriculum may be altered through a range of complex classroom interactions, and what is actually delivered can be considered the "implemented" curriculum. What learners really learn constitutes the "achieved" or "learned" curriculum. In addition, curriculum theory points to a "hidden" curriculum. Those who develop the intended curriculum should have all these different dimensions of the curriculum in view. While the "written" curriculum does not exhaust the meaning of curriculum, it is important because it represents the vision of the society. The "written" curriculum is usually expressed in comprehensive and user-friendly documents, such as curriculum frameworks or subject curricula/syllabi, and in relevant and helpful learning materials, such as textbooks, teacher guides, and assessment guides.
In some cases, people see the curriculum entirely in terms of the subjects that are taught, and as set out within the set of textbooks, and forget the wider goals of competencies and personal development. This is why a curriculum framework is important. It sets the subjects within this wider context, and shows how learning experiences within the subjects need to contribute to the attainment of the wider goals.
Curriculum is almost always defined with relation to schooling. According to some, it is the major division between formal and informal education. However, under some circumstances it may also be applied to informal education or free-choice learning settings. For instance, a science museum may have a "curriculum" of what topics or exhibits it wishes to cover. Many after-school programs in the US have tried to apply the concept; this typically has more success when not rigidly clinging to the definition of curriculum as a product or as a body of knowledge to be transferred. Rather, informal education and free-choice learning settings are more suited to the model of curriculum as practice or praxis.

Historical conception

Whatever the origins and intentions of early curricula, the function of inculcating culture had emerged by the time of ancient Babylonia. Ancient Roman curricula came to emphasise Greek as well as Latin skills, with emphasis on the study of classical poetry. This model influenced the curricula of medieval and Renaissance
education.
In the early years of the 20th century, the traditional concept held of the curriculum was "that it is a body of subjects or subject matter prepared by the teachers for the students to learn". It was synonymous to the "course of study" and "syllabus".
In The Curriculum, the first textbook published on the subject, in 1918, John Franklin Bobbitt said that curriculum, as an idea, has its roots in the Latin word for race-course, explaining the curriculum as the course of deeds and experiences through which children become the adults they should be to succeed later in life. Furthermore, the curriculum encompasses the entire scope of formative deed and experience occurring in and out of school - such as experiences that are unplanned and undirected or those that are intentionally directed for the purposeful formation of adult members of society - not only experiences occurring in school.
To Bobbitt, the curriculum is a social-engineering arena. Per his cultural presumptions and social definitions, his curricular formulation has two notable features:

that scientific experts would best be qualified to and justified in designing curricula based upon their expert knowledge of what qualities are desirable in adult members of society, and which experiences would generate said qualities
curriculum defined as the deeds-experiences the student ought to have to become the adult he or she ought to become

Hence, he defined the curriculum as an ideal, rather than as the concrete reality of the deeds and experiences that form who and what people become.
Contemporary views of curriculum reject these features of Bobbitt's postulates, but retain the basis of curriculum as the course of experience that form humans into persons. Personal formation via curricula is studied both at the personal and group levels, i.e. cultures and societies. The formation of a group is reciprocal, with the formation of its individual participants.
Although it formally appeared in Bobbitt's definition, curriculum as a course of formative experience also pervades the work of John Dewey, who disagreed with Bobbitt on important matters. Although Bobbitt's and Dewey's idealistic understanding of "curriculum" is different from current, restricted uses of the word, writers of curricula and researchers generally share it as common, substantive understanding of curriculum. Development does not mean just getting something out of the mind. It is a development of experience and into experience that is really wanted.
Robert M. Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, regarded curriculum as "permanent studies" where the rules of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and mathematics for basic education are emphasized. Basic education should emphasize the three Rs and college education should be grounded on liberal education. On the other hand, Arthur Bestor, an essentialist, believes that the mission of the school should be intellectual training. Hence, curriculum should focus on the fundamental intellectual disciplines of grammar, literature, and writing. It should also include mathematics, science, history, and foreign language.
According to Joseph Schwab, discipline is the sole source of curriculum. In our education system, curriculum is divided into chunks of knowledge called subject areas in basic education including English, mathematics, science, and social studies. In college, discipline may include humanities, sciences, languages, and many more. Curricula should consist entirely of knowledge which comes from various disciplines. Dewey proposed that learning the lesson should be more interesting and beneficial than receiving a scolding, being ridiculed, or being required to stay after school, among other punishments.
Thus, a curriculum can be viewed as a field of study. It is made up of its foundations, domains of knowledge, as well as its research theories and principles. Curricula as an area of study should be scholarly and theoretical. The field is concerned with broad, historical, philosophical social issues and academics. Mark Smith suggests a starting definition of "curriculum" offered by John Kerr and taken up by Vic Kelly in his standard work on the curriculum: "All the learning which is planned and guided by the school, whether it is carried on in groups or individually, inside or outside the school".
There are four ways of approaching curriculum theory and practice:

curriculum as a body of knowledge to be transmitted
curriculum as an attempt to help students achieve a goal
curriculum as a process
curriculum as praxis

In recent years the field of education and curriculum has expanded outside the walls of the classroom and into other settings, such as museums. Within these settings curriculum is an even broader topic, including various teachers, inanimate objects such as audio-tour devices, and even the learners themselves. As with the traditional idea of curriculum, curriculum in a free-choice learning-environment can consist of the explicit stated curriculum and the hidden curriculum; both of which contribute to the learner's experience and lessons from the experience. These elements are further compounded by the setting, cultural influences, and the state of mind of the learner. Museums and other similar settings are most commonly leveraged within traditional classroom settings as enhancements to the curriculum when educators develop curricula that encompass visits to museums, zoos, and aquariums.