MEDD8937 Chap.4 Educative Curriculum Materials
Educative Curriculum Materials
A material is not a curriculum
The session opens with two definitions held deliberately apart. A curriculum is a plan for the experiences learners will encounter together with the experiences they actually do encounter, designed to help them reach specified objectives. Instructional materials are the resources that back up or extend teaching: textbooks, curriculum guides, written descriptions of tasks, and software.
Keeping them separate prevents the commonest shortcut in implementation planning, which is to treat replacing a textbook as implementing a change.
Materials are described as the mediator between official expectation and classroom practice, with the important qualification that where a system is centralised enough the materials are not a separate layer at all but part of the official curriculum, at which point the mediator disappears and departing from the book is departing from policy.
The enactment chain, and the forces acting at each station
The session models enactment as a sequence running from the official curriculum, through instructional materials that are adopted, selected or incorporated, to the curriculum the teacher means to teach, then the enacted one, then student outcomes, with the content of consequential assessments pressing on the middle of it.
Each station carries its own influence set. Official curricula are shaped by what society is felt to need, by advances in knowledge and in assessment, by policy constraints, and by the values of groups that hold power. Materials are shaped by publishers and market forces, official goals, professional societies, research on learning and the vision of their developers.
The teacher-intended curriculum is shaped by teacher knowledge and beliefs, access to resources and support, understanding of particular students and local expectations.
The enacted curriculum is shaped by teacher and student knowledge and practice, access to instructional technologies, and contextual opportunities and constraints.
Four stances towards materials, each with a theory attached
The session sets out four conceptions of how teachers use materials.
Following or subverting treats materials as fixed representations and teachers as enactors, holds that fidelity is possible and desirable, rests on positivism and studies the agency of the text. Drawing on treats materials as one resource among several and teachers as active designers with agency over the curriculum, and studies the agency of teachers.
Interpreting treats materials as representations of tasks and concepts and teachers as meaning makers, holds that fidelity is impossible, rests on interpretivism or reader-response theory, and studies the nature of the interpretation and its classroom effects.
Participating with treats materials as artefacts and tools produced by sociocultural evolution and teachers as collaborators, with both parties taking part, and studies the participatory relationship itself.
Alongside this sits a framework listing what each party brings, including pedagogical design capacity and tolerance for discomfort on the teacher side and structures, voice and look on the material side.
What makes a material educative
Educative curriculum materials set out to teach the teacher at the same time as the class, and the educative features are the parts of them that carry the teacher half of that job.
The reported benefits are that the subject vocabulary teachers reach for improves, the accounts they give of classroom phenomena become more accurate, and the textbooks and materials already in the room get used to better effect.
Four design principles follow: assume teachers will adapt and offer adaptations that answer a spread of student needs without losing what the reform was for; ground features in practice, through narratives of enactment and rubrics set beside a piece of real student work with a comment a teacher might write on it; meet the larger subject knowledge the change calls for by using several forms of support at once, among them content storylines, definitions written for students, and graphics; and build a constellation of features while helping teachers recognise how a recommendation differs from their current practice.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Curriculum and instructional materials as two separate definitions
- 02
Materials as mediator, and what changes in a centralised system
- 03
The five stations of the enactment process
- 04
The influence sets acting on each station
- 05
What a teacher brings, from design capacity to tolerance for discomfort
- 06
What a material brings, from structures to voice and look
- 07
Four conceptions of material use and the theory behind each
- 08
Educative features and the reported benefits of using them
- 09
Four design principles for building an educative feature
Rewrite a teacher note as an educative feature
- 2Say why the draft cannot be educative as written.
- 4Supply the four parts of a rewrite.
- 2Attach each part to a published design principle.
Key terms
- Instructional Materials
- The resources that back up or extend teaching, such as textbooks, curriculum guides, written task descriptions and software, as distinct from the curriculum itself.
- Educative Curriculum Materials
- Materials designed to support the learning of teachers as well as students, in which specific educative features carry the support for teacher learning.
- Educative Feature
- An element of a material that gives a teacher what she needs to make a decision the material cannot make for her, rather than telling her what to do or explaining why it works.
- Teacher-intended Curriculum
- The station in the enactment chain at which a teacher has decided what she will teach, shaped by her knowledge and beliefs, her access to resources and her reading of particular students.
- Enacted Curriculum
- What actually happens in the room, shaped by teacher and student knowledge and practice, access to instructional technologies, and the opportunities and constraints of the setting.
- Pedagogical Design Capacity
- A teacher's ability to perceive and use the resources in a set of materials to construct instruction, listed among the characteristics she brings to the relationship with a curriculum.
- Participatory Relationship
- The two-way relation between a teacher and a set of materials in which each shapes what the other becomes in the classroom, rather than the material determining the lesson.
- Content Storyline
- A form of support that states the idea a lesson is building and how its activities contribute to it, offered as one of several ways to strengthen a teacher's grasp of the content.
Educative Curriculum Materials FAQ
What is the difference between drawing on materials and interpreting them?
They differ on one question: whether fidelity remains coherent. Under drawing on, the teacher selects from a material she could in principle have used as written, so fidelity is a standard she chose not to meet. Under interpreting, the material only ever offers representations that somebody has to read, so there is no unmediated version to be faithful to.
That is why an evaluation designed under the first can report deviation and one designed under the second cannot.
Does a centralised curriculum make teacher adaptation disappear?
No, and a study of language teachers working under exactly that condition found the opposite. They were reading, evaluating, appropriating and adapting the prescribed materials through adjusting, replacing, supplementing, revising, omitting and inventing, driven by their own beliefs and goals, the local and examination-driven context, the design of the materials and their students.
Any plan assuming a prescribed textbook produces uniform lessons is assuming something the evidence contradicts.
Why does the framework include tolerance for discomfort?
Because it predicts whether a teacher will stay with an activity whose outcome she cannot forecast, which is precisely what inquiry teaching requires.
It sits alongside more familiar items such as subject matter knowledge and beliefs, and together with the material's voice it explains many cases where strong materials produce ordinary lessons: nobody in the text speaks to the teacher, and the teacher will not tolerate not knowing what happens next.
Assessment move
Take one page of a guide you already use and mark every sentence as instruction, explanation or educative feature. Most pages turn out to be almost entirely the first two, and the exercise gives you both a diagnosis of the material and a ready-made example for the support strategies section of your plan.
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