MEDD6128 Curriculum Conceptions and Design
The Complete Study & Assessment Guide · MEDD6128 Overview
- The University of Hong Kong
- First Semester, 2026-27
- Postgraduate core module
- Education
- Eight sessions of three hours
What this course is actually asking you to do
This is a core module of a taught master's programme in the Faculty of Education, and its aim is to familiarise you with the field of curriculum studies, its main theoretical perspectives and its enduring issues.
- Assessed by A two thousand word written paper, a group presentation with a written proposal before it, and class participation graded against published descriptors.
- The skill being tested Taking a position on what education is for, deriving a curriculum design from it, and answering the objection a rival position would raise.
- Hardest step Choosing a curricular issue narrow enough that a framework built on one or two ideologies could actually resolve it.
- Where to confirm Weights, deadlines and submission arrangements are controlled by the course Moodle page.
How MEDD6128 is assessed
| Component | Weight | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Written Paper | 50% | Two thousand words on a curriculum or curricular area at any level from kindergarten through to undergraduate, in a context of your choice, explaining how and why it should be redesigned for emerging situations. It must address a different curriculum from the group presentation. |
| Group Presentation: Competing Ideologies and Balancing Stakeholder Demands | 30% | Groups of four to five, fifteen minutes plus five minutes of questions, with one question from another group and one from the instructor. A proposal of 600 to 800 words is submitted beforehand and receives feedback. |
| Class participation and group discussion | 20% | Graded against published descriptors from A to F covering both how consistently you participate and how well you engage with others contributions. Group discussion slides are uploaded to the course site. |
The published course outline lists these three components and their weights total one hundred per cent. Two points are worth knowing. First, no hurdle, no pass mark, no minimum attendance figure, no late submission penalty and no grading scale appears anywhere in the course materials, so the hurdle column above says only that the materials do not state one; check the course Moodle page for whether any University level rule applies to you. Second, two published requirements are easy to miss because they are not weights: the presentation is stopped at the fifteen minute mark with no exceptions, and the written paper must be about a different curriculum from the one your group presented on. Confirm the current split, the deadlines and the submission settings on Moodle before planning your time.
Assessment structure
Current MEDD6128 dates
| Date | Item | Control |
|---|---|---|
| 30 September 2026 | Presentation proposal, 600 to 800 words | Published in the course outline as the proposal due date for this offering, and repeated in the opening session materials. |
| 9 November 2026 | Group presentation, in the last class | Published in the course outline and matching the last of the eight teaching dates for this offering. |
| 1 December 2026 | Written paper | Published in the course outline and repeated in the opening session materials. |
Dates are as published in the published course outline and the opening session materials for this offering. Confirm exact deadlines and submission settings in the live LMS.
What MEDD6128 covers
Seven chapters follow the published teaching sequence from the definitions and classification of curriculum through decision making and the four curriculum ideologies to design levels, assessment and technology, and the arguments that drive curricular change.
Defining and Classifying the Curriculum
six curricula and where the intention marker stops · planned, enacted and experienced · the component ladder from policy to lesson · a century of named periods · four families of curriculum theoryWhy 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.
- Curriculum as a word stretched across several different objects
- Six types, and the three the course marks as intentional
- Planned, enacted and experienced, and the agent each names
- The component ladder from a policy down to one lesson
- Prescriptive against descriptive, and what each can settle
- The hidden curriculum and its three families of variable
Perspectives Shaping Curriculum Decisions
the stages model and what it hides · decision makers against stakeholders and influences · top down and bottom up · the economy as a default criterion · reading a system you do not live inThe stages model, and the reason to learn its critique alongside it
The policy cycle grew from a systems view in which popular will is an input, processing stages convert it, and policy emerges as an output.
- The stages model, its heuristic value and its distorting frame
- Policy as a course of action that changes over time
- Decision makers, stakeholders and influences, and what separates them
- The same body occupying different roles at different levels
- Top down decisions against bottom up action
- Discretion at the point of action, and when variation is predicted
Curriculum Conceptions and Ideologies
four visions at war for a century · what each makes the curriculum answerable to · five questions that force them apart · why the course says ideology rather than philosophy · the boundaries that stay softA century of contest, not a century of progress
Educators have been at war over what a school curriculum should be for roughly a hundred years, and the war is described here as a contest between four visions rather than as a sequence of improvements.
- Four visions, and why competition improved curricula without producing consensus
- What each position makes the curriculum answerable to
- The scholar academic position and the extension of a discipline
- The social efficiency position, terminal objectives and the client
- The learner centred position and the person as source of content
- The social reconstruction position and its three assumptions
Key Design Principles from Competing Ideologies
the ladder from a position to a decision · nine published label sets and four positions · the principle each position supplies and what it forbids · keeping a two ideology framework coherentSame readings, different task
This session and the one before it share their reading list entirely, and the sharing is a signal about what changes between them. The material is identical; the task is not.
- The shared reading list, and what changes between the two sessions
- The ladder from position to design question to principle to decision
- Why each narrowing is a contestable commitment
- Nine published schemes and four underlying positions
- A label that points the wrong way, and how to report it
- Deliberative theory as a claim about process rather than teaching
Curriculum Design Levels, Modes and Principles
what each level can and cannot settle · what a framework quietly does · subject, learner and problem centred modes · differentiation as a demand · nine implementation leversWhat each level can and cannot settle
Design is treated here as a multi level activity, and the level is not a detail of implementation. It determines which instruments exist, which actors must be persuaded and which objections are fatal.
- Four levels and the decision rights each one holds
- What a level cannot settle, and why reforms die there
- The framework as a promise of coherence
- Three documented reservations about frameworks
- Subject centred, learner centred and problem centred modes
- Differentiation as a demand on every mode
Assessment and Technology in Curriculum Design
grading against learning · why the formative and summative split will not hold · what the evidence base actually contains · four equity lenses on one system · what generative tools changedTwo purposes pulling in different directions
Reformers almost always want assessment in their plans and frequently treat it as the main instrument of reform, which is why this session places it inside design rather than after it.
- Grading and learning as competing purposes of one act
- How national assessment arrangements encode trust in teachers
- The claim that formative assessment is a judgement plus usable feedback
- Letter and spirit, and why formative reform stalls
- Wash back from high stakes instruments
- Benchmarking and value added assessment as accountability instruments
Curricular Shifts in Changing Times
reconstructing the case against a subject area · which premise to attack and what to concede · designing a curriculum around a technology · language, intent and applicationThe case against a subject area is an argument, so reconstruct it
The final taught session asks what a curriculum should become when its context changes, and it approaches the question through the arguments themselves.
- A case for cutting a subject, written out as a formal argument
- Which premise to attack and which to concede
- Democratic goods as national value without economic return
- Arguing in the vocabulary an opponent is obliged to use
- The hidden conditional in any proposal to add or remove a subject
- Three crises and a curriculum proposed to answer all of them
It introduces the main conceptions of curriculum and the various ways those conceptions are categorised, then examines their basic tenets critically and explores what they imply for curriculum design and analysis at multiple levels of an education system. There is no examination.
Every mark is earned by taking a position on a curriculum question and defending it, in class discussion, in a group presentation that will be questioned, and in a two thousand word paper.
Defining and Classifying the Curriculum
The opening chapter refuses to settle on one definition, and the refusal is deliberate.
The word has been stretched to mean the subjects taught, the content, the materials, the performance objectives, everything a school plans and the whole of what a student takes away, and those are different objects rather than competing attempts at one definition.
The chapter fixes the six curriculum types the course uses, from recommended through written, supported, taught and tested to learned, and separates the planned, enacted and experienced levels that cut the same material a different way.
It closes with a century of named periods and four families of curriculum theory.
Perspectives Shaping Curriculum Decisions
Nothing in a school curriculum arrives from nowhere, and this chapter supplies the apparatus for saying who decided what.
It sets out the stages model of the policy process together with its own critique, separates decision makers from stakeholders and from influences across national, regional and school levels, and stages the dispute between top down and bottom up accounts of what happens between a decision and an action.
It closes with the argument that governments default to economic criteria in curriculum policy, and with a test for whether a devolution of decision rights is really a loosening.
Curriculum Conceptions and Ideologies
The heart of the course.
Four visions of what schooling is for have been in contest for roughly a century: the scholar academic position, which makes the curriculum answerable to the disciplines; the social efficiency position, which makes it answerable to a client's stated need; the learner centred position, which treats the person as the source of the content; and the social reconstruction position, which treats the curriculum as an instrument for building a more just society.
The chapter gives five questions that force the positions apart and explains why the course speaks of ideology rather than philosophy.
Key Design Principles from Competing Ideologies
This session shares its readings with the one before it, and the sharing is a signal: the material is the same and the task is not.
Here you take a position you have adopted and derive a design from it, through a ladder that runs from the position to the design question, to the principle that position supplies, to a decision a named actor could take.
The chapter also solves the vocabulary problem, since the same four positions appear in the literature under at least a dozen sets of names, and gives the rule that keeps a framework built on two ideologies coherent.
Curriculum Design Levels, Modes and Principles
Design is a multi level activity, and the level determines which instruments are available and which objections are fatal.
The chapter sets out what each level can and cannot settle, explains what a curriculum framework is and what it quietly does, and separates subject centred, learner centred and problem centred design modes while showing why differentiation is a demand on all three rather than a fourth mode.
It closes with the nine levers that the implementation literature says a coherent strategy has to account for at once.
Assessment and Technology in Curriculum Design
Reformers almost always reach for assessment, and the difficulty is that assessment is about grading and about learning at the same time.
The chapter shows why the formative and summative distinction does not hold as cleanly as it is taught, why high stakes instruments crowd out formative work, and what the evidence base for artificial intelligence in school assessment actually contains.
It closes with four lenses for asking whether such systems reduce inequity or widen it, and with a precise statement of what generative tools changed.
Curricular Shifts in Changing Times
The final taught topic asks how a case for changing a curriculum is made and answered.
It reconstructs the argument used to justify cutting an area of study as a formal three part argument, shows why the productive move is to concede the premise your opponent came to defend and attack the one nobody questioned, and looks at a proposal to build a new area of study around a technology.
It ends with evidence about what happens to a reform on the way down through an institution, and the three degrees of engagement that evidence distinguishes.
Worked example · free
Turn a contested issue into a framework a rival could argue with
- 3Name the design question actually in dispute, and show it is not a content question.
- 4Say which position governs that question and what it therefore forbids.
- 3State the strongest objection from the rival position and answer it on its own terms.
Key terms
- Written Curriculum
- The approved guide that gives curriculum goals a document, more detailed than a recommendation and dominated by education departments and school leaders. It is one of the three types the course marks as intentional.
- Learned Curriculum
- The school experiences that shape a student's values, perceptions and behaviour. It is the only one of the six types the course describes as intentional and hidden together, which is why it can contain effects nobody specified.
- Hidden Curriculum
- The aspects of schooling outside the intended programme that still change values, perceptions and behaviour, working through three families of variable at once: the organisational, the social systemic, and the social and cultural.
- Enacted Curriculum
- The curriculum as professional judgement implements it, where a teacher's authority over pedagogy can come into conflict with the plan. It sits between what was planned and what a learner experiences.
- Decision Maker
- A person or body whose office or standing carries the power to settle particular questions of what gets taught, at what point, in what manner and by which staff. The category is defined by authority rather than by interest.
- Curriculum Ideology
- A comprehensive vision of how education should be organised and function, treated as the motive underlying behaviour rather than as an articulated belief, because expressed intent is frequently contradicted by actual practice.
- Scholar Academic Ideology
- The position that education exists to extend the academic disciplines by bringing young people into them, so that learning a field means acquiring its subject matter, the frames it reasons with and its habits of mind.
- Social Efficiency Ideology
- The position that schooling exists to meet the needs of society or another client efficiently, working backwards from terminal objectives to the most efficient route that produces a person who meets them.
- Learner Centered Ideology
- The position that education exists for the growth of individuals according to their own natures, treating people as the source of curriculum content and a curriculum as an environment in which meaning is made.
- Social Reconstruction Ideology
- The position that education exists to help build a more just society, assuming that the present society is unhealthy, that a vision of a better one can be developed, and that action must follow.
- Curriculum Framework
- A group of related subjects or themes assembled against criteria fixed in advance so that between them they span an area of study, supplying a shape inside which subjects get designed, plus a justification and a policy setting for carrying them further.
MEDD6128 FAQ
Is there an examination in this course?
No. The published outline sets out three components and none of them is a sitting: a written paper of two thousand words carrying half the mark, a group presentation carrying thirty per cent with a short proposal submitted beforehand, and class participation and group discussion carrying twenty per cent. Prepare accordingly, because nothing here rewards being able to recall a reading under time pressure.
What every component rewards instead is holding a defensible position and answering the strongest objection to it.
How much does each piece of work count, and do the weights add up?
The outline gives fifty per cent to the written paper, thirty to the group presentation and twenty to class participation and group discussion, which totals one hundred. Two published requirements sit outside the weights and are easy to overlook: the presentation is stopped at the fifteen minute mark with no exceptions, and the paper must be about a curriculum other than the one your group presented on.
Confirm the current split and the deadlines on Moodle before planning your time.
What are the four curriculum ideologies and why do they matter so much here?
They are the scholar academic, social efficiency, learner centred and social reconstruction positions, and they differ on what a curriculum should be answerable to: a discipline, a client's stated need, the growing person, or an unjust social arrangement. They matter because the group presentation asks you to map how each of them views a contested issue and then to build a framework from one or two of them.
Recognising a position from its commitments rather than from its vocabulary is the single most assessed skill in the course.
How do I choose a topic for the group presentation?
The brief asks for a contested contemporary curricular issue in a specific field and a context of your group's choice, and the practical test is whether a framework built on one or two positions could actually resolve it. If you cannot name the decision somebody has to take, you still have a subject area rather than an issue.
A topic that passes the test also gives you something concrete to say about alignment with regional or national and global mandates, which the brief requires in the conclusion.
What is the written paper actually asking for?
Choose a curriculum or curricular area at any level from kindergarten through to undergraduate in a context of your choice, and explain how and why it should be re-imagined or redesigned to respond to emerging social, environmental, technological or economic situations.
The suggested structure runs from context and main argument, through analysis of the novel situations and the relevant literature and a brief analysis of the existing curriculum and its limits, to the major changes required and a conclusion. The word why is where the theoretical concepts have to enter.
Why does the level of a design decision matter so much?
Because the level determines which instruments exist. A school can change its timetable, its staffing pattern and what it teaches, but cannot change what a public qualification rewards; a system can change the qualification but cannot decide what happens in a particular lesson.
Most curriculum problems that look like failures of will are really proposals addressed to a level that could not act on them, and saying which level must act is what turns an opinion into a recommendation.
What does this course say about artificial intelligence and assessment?
It treats the question as a design problem rather than as a policing problem. The central reading offers four lenses on whether such systems reduce or widen inequity, covering the surrounding system, the data a model learned from, the algorithms themselves, and what happens when automated and human decisions interact.
A second reading argues that generative tools are unlikely to destroy education but may destroy the legitimacy of some long held practices, with the exposure concentrated where a course relies on a narrow range of task types.
Can I use generative tools in my work for this course?
Only within a specific rule that the outline sets out, so read it there rather than assuming general practice. University provided tools are welcomed for prompting initial general ideas and for initial scans of research that you then analyse in detail, and using them for feedback on your own writing is welcomed provided the assistance is fully acknowledged, the assisted portions identified and the tools named.
Submitting full sentences or paragraphs they generated is stated to be strictly prohibited, and using them to translate an assessment from another language is treated the same way.
Questions students ask in each MEDD6128 chapter
- 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. Chapter 01 · Defining and Classifying the Curriculum
- Why does it matter whether someone is a stakeholder or an influence?
- Because only one of those categories can be addressed with a proposal that changes anything. A recommendation aimed at a group with no authority over what is taught will at best move the agenda, which is a real outcome but a different one from a change in practice. Naming the category forces you to say what your proposal could realistically achieve, and a presentation that cannot name the role and level of the body that would have to act has offered an opinion rather than a framework. Chapter 02 · Perspectives Shaping Curriculum Decisions
- How do I recognise a position when a document uses unfamiliar vocabulary?
- Ask what the document treats the curriculum as answerable to, and check the five questions rather than the adjectives. The learner centred position alone has travelled under child study, progressive education, open education, developmentally appropriate practice and constructivism, so a reader who knows one of those names will miss the position under another. Documents borrow vocabulary from positions they do not hold far more easily than they borrow the answers, which is why the questions are reliable and the words are not. Chapter 03 · Curriculum Conceptions and Ideologies
- Why does this session repeat the previous session's readings?
- Because the same material supports two different operations and the course wants both performed. Recognising a position in a document you did not write is an interpretive task, and deriving a design from a position you have adopted is a productive one. Students who read the second session as revision arrive at the presentation able to name four positions and unable to build anything from one, which is the failure the shared reading list is arranged to prevent. Chapter 04 · Key Design Principles from Competing Ideologies
- Why does the level of a proposal matter more than its quality?
- Because a level determines what instruments exist, and a recommendation that requires an instrument the addressed level does not hold cannot be acted on however well argued it is. A school asked to change what a public qualification rewards is being asked for something outside its authority entirely, and a system asked to guarantee what happens in a specific lesson is in the same position. Naming the level early also tells you which objections are fatal and which are merely interesting. Chapter 05 · Curriculum Design Levels, Modes and Principles
- Is a low stakes quiz automatically formative?
- No, and assuming so is the commonest design error in this area. The label attaches to whether a judgement is followed by feedback the learner actually uses, not to the frequency or the stakes of the task. A fortnightly quiz whose results are averaged into a final grade is summative assessment at fortnightly intervals, and attaching a consequence to it also introduces the wash back that limits formative opportunity elsewhere in the course. Chapter 06 · Assessment and Technology in Curriculum Design
- Why should I write out an argument I disagree with?
- Because until it is written out you cannot see which part of it is actually carrying the weight, and you will attack the part that annoys you rather than the part that is weakest. Reconstruction also protects you from the failure that makes most curriculum advocacy ineffective, which is treating opposition as a mood to be countered with enthusiasm. A written argument has premises, and a premise can be shown to be false in a way a mood cannot. Chapter 07 · Curricular Shifts in Changing Times
How to prepare for the assessments
Choose one curriculum you actually know in the first week and carry it through every chapter, answering each chapter's question about it before reading the chapter's own answer. Then practise the move the whole course is built on: write the position you hold in one line, write underneath it the design decision that follows and the thing that position rules out, and write the strongest objection a rival position would make.
Twenty minutes of that on paper is worth more than a second pass over the readings, because it is the only exercise that rehearses what the proposal, the presentation and the paper all ask for.
Your AI Education tutor for MEDD6128
Stuck on a hard MEDD6128 question? Sia is AskSia’s AI Education tutor — ask any MEDD6128 Curriculum Conceptions and Design question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how the course is actually taught and assessed. Read this whole study guide free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
