MEDD6128 Chap.1 Defining and Classifying the Curriculum
Defining and Classifying the Curriculum
Why the course refuses to settle on one definition
The word descends from a Latin root meaning to run a course, and it has been stretched ever since to mean the subjects taught, the content, the set of materials, the performance objectives, everything a school plans, and the whole of what any one student takes away from having been at school. Those are not rival attempts at one definition.
They are different objects, and the unproductive arguments about school programmes are almost always two people naming two of them with the same word. The first task of this chapter is to make you able to hear which object a speaker means.
Six types, and where the intention marker stops
The classification the course uses runs from recommended, through written, supported, taught and tested, to learned.
Written, supported and taught are each marked as intentional in the teaching materials. Recommended and tested carry no such marker, and learned is marked as intentional and hidden together, which makes it the only type that openly contains effects nobody specified.
Reading the six as a funnel in which each carries a shrinking share of the one above is a mistake for that reason: what the sequence tracks is where control sits, not how much survives.
Three levels that cut the same material differently
Alongside the six types sits an older division into the planned, the enacted and the experienced curriculum.
The planned level is about what knowledge is of most worth and carries the legitimacy of standardised guidelines. The enacted level is about professional judgement, and a teacher's authority there can collide with the plan, which is why the distance between a syllabus and a lesson is a normal feature of schooling.
No account of the experienced level can be complete, whether written in advance or afterwards, because it is individual and ongoing.
The value of this cut is that it names an agent for each level.
Prescriptive and descriptive definitions answer different questions
A prescriptive definition says what ought to happen: a plan, an intended programme, an expert view of what schools need to do, sometimes followed by practitioners and sometimes not. A descriptive definition says what the curriculum does to people, including the unintended results.
Neither family can settle the other's question, and naming which one you are working in is the cheapest way to stop an argument going in circles.
The hidden curriculum belongs to the descriptive family and has a specific content here, working through three families of variable at once: the organisational, the social systemic, and the social and cultural.
A century that oscillates rather than progresses
The named periods running from academic scientism at the end of the nineteenth century to technological functionalism in the present are not a list to memorise.
They are evidence that curriculum debate restarts from opposite ends rather than advancing: one period begins from scientific knowledge, the next contains both a child centred orientation and a functional one that treats learning as what processes a child into a model adult, and the swing continues.
A classification of theories by purpose sits alongside them, separating structure oriented, value oriented, content oriented and process oriented work, with only the third of those being prescriptive.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Curriculum as a word stretched across several different objects
- 02
Six types, and the three the course marks as intentional
- 03
Planned, enacted and experienced, and the agent each names
- 04
The component ladder from a policy down to one lesson
- 05
Prescriptive against descriptive, and what each can settle
- 06
The hidden curriculum and its three families of variable
- 07
A century of named periods, and the two starting points it alternates between
- 08
Four families of curriculum theory, and which one is prescriptive
- 09
Contemporaneity, discursive balkanisation and methodological diffusion
Four true claims about one programme, at four different types
- 3Assign the two day allocation and the shared period to their types.
- 3Assign the examination paper and the student description.
- 2Say where the intention stopped, and what that implies for a repair.
Key terms
- Recommended Curriculum
- The goals and general recommendations that scholars and policy bodies argue should be emphasised, grounded in a values system. It carries no intention marker in this scheme, which is why it is not yet a decision.
- Supported Curriculum
- The curriculum that time allocation, staffing relative to student numbers, and learning materials actually permit. It is the resource shadow that a written document casts, and it is where many intentions stop.
- Taught Curriculum
- Teacher delivery, described in the course as the curriculum in action. It is marked as intentional, and it is the level at which professional judgement can depart from the plan.
- Tested Curriculum
- The knowledge and skills that classroom and standardised assessment reach. Aligning it with the other types is described as a complex process rather than a clerical one.
- Null Curriculum
- What a programme does not offer, understood as itself teaching that the omitted material is unimportant. The claim is easiest to evidence where an omission is structural and documented.
- Currere
- The Latin infinitive of curriculum, revived to foreground the running rather than the course, and used to develop an autobiographical method of self study.
- Curricular Goals
- The long term educational outcomes expected of a whole programme, more general than objectives. A proposal offering only new goals has not yet said anything a school could act on.
- Structure Oriented Theory
- Curriculum theory concerned mainly with analysing the components of a curriculum and how they relate to one another. It is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Defining and Classifying the Curriculum FAQ
Why does this course spend a whole session on definitions before anything else?
Because a definition decides what you will count as evidence before you have seen any. A claim about a school programme can be simultaneously true of the written document and false of what students experience, and two people arguing from those two objects can exchange accurate statements indefinitely without converging.
Fixing the vocabulary first is what allows the later sessions to treat a disagreement about a curriculum as something that can actually be settled.
Is the six type classification a ranking of importance?
No, and reading it that way produces bad recommendations. It tracks where control over the curriculum sits at each point, and the course marks only three of the six as intentional. The learned type is marked as intentional and hidden together, so it contains effects that were never specified anywhere, which means it cannot be a subset of what was written.
Treating the sequence as a funnel of diminishing fidelity misses exactly the feature that makes it useful.
What is the practical difference between the hidden curriculum and side effects?
The hidden curriculum has a stated content in this course rather than being a general word for unintended consequences. It operates through organisational variables, meaning the way students get sorted into teaching groups, social system variables such as the economic conditions that decide what is learnable, and social and cultural variables such as whose cultural capital the school treats as normal.
An analysis that names the category without naming which of the three is operating has identified a label, and no redesign follows from a label.
Do I need to memorise the historical periods?
Not as a list of dates, but the shape matters and is assessable. The sequence exists to support a claim the rest of the course depends on, which is that curriculum debate alternates between starting from the discipline or society and starting from the child, rather than progressing toward a settled answer.
Knowing that lets you recognise a current reform proposal as a familiar position in new vocabulary, which is a much stronger analytic move than describing it as innovative.
What does it mean to say curriculum studies is not a discipline?
The field is described as interdisciplinary rather than scientific or academic, and three tensions are named to explain its present condition: a fragmented relationship to its own past sources, many separate theoretical conversations proceeding under one label, and methods that are not well connected to the frameworks meant to justify them.
The practical consequence for your work is that you should expect to find several vocabularies for the same idea, and should say which one you are using.
Assessment move
Draw the six types from memory and write one real fact about a programme you know under each. Then mark which of your six facts you could actually evidence. The types you cannot evidence are usually the supported and the learned, and noticing that is more useful than filling them in with guesses, because it tells you what a serious analysis of that programme would have to go and find.
Working through Defining and Classifying the Curriculum in MEDD6128? Sia is AskSia’s AI Education tutor — ask any MEDD6128 Defining and Classifying the Curriculum question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how MEDD6128 is taught and assessed. Read this chapter free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
