Department:
Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy
Project lead:
Dr. Kerry Renwick
Project members:
Dr. Tony Edwards; Ms. Kiera Brant-Birioukov
Reflection:
What led you to your project/what inspired your work?
The focus of the work in this project is to rework a core course for graduate students in EDCP.
The Department is committed to advancing research into learning and teaching in a variety of contexts and across the lifespan. There is a focus on transdisciplinary areas of scholarly inquiry such as curriculum theory, design and evaluation, curriculum and pedagogy in higher education, and learning and teaching in informal educational settings. In response to this mission it seemed important to consider ways to include Indigenous understandings about curriculum.
Within a current online version of EDCP 562 Curriculum Issues and Theories content explores ideas about curriculum through various ideological lenses – academic; social efficiency; learner centered; and social reconstruction. These ideologies reflect settler world views and draw heavily from European and North American theorists. This project offered an ideal opportunity to re-write course material to ensure Indigenous perspectives were also represented, to provide learners with a more holistic understanding of curriculum.
What have you learned so far?
The brief was to ensure that Indigenous perspectives of curriculum were included throughout the course rather than provide some detail at the beginning or end of the course. By ensuring that an Indigenous perspective was evident in every aspect of the course (modules, assignments, discussion threads) meant that there was opportunity to compare and contrast Indigenous and Western/settler positions.
This approach has meant that i) by incorporating Indigenous perspectives throughout the course we felt that we have avoided a tokenistic approach; ii) there is greater opportunity to engage with Indigenous perspectives; and iii) students are able to develop deeper understandings about curriculum as expression of human learning.
Where do you plan to go?
This project was instigated to re-develop one version of EDCP 562 as a course. The course is also offered by other academics in EDCP in and various delivery modes i.e. face to face and blended.
To share the learnings and artefacts developed within this project it is intended that it will be presented at the Department meeting in September or October 2021. As a result of this sharing colleagues in EDCP teaching the course will have opportunity to see what was developed and engage with possibilities for including content and assessment ideas in their own version of the course.
Short Summary of your project
All graduate students undertaking their masters level study within the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy are required to undertake the course Introduction to Curriculum Issues and Theories (EDCP 562). This course aims to builds an understanding of ‘what is curriculum?’ and how certain knowledge is presented as being the most worthwhile, and how it is expected and assumed to be acquired in educational contexts, especially schools K-12.
Given this focus it would seem pertinent to include a component focused on ‘Unsettling the curriculum’ where the intention is to provide opportunity to think about learning that has sustained First People for millennia and to counter dominant paradigms about curriculum development.
The goal of this project is to build students understanding by broadening their perspectives and understanding of why there is a need to unsettle curriculum.
Assignment 1: Curriculum as Autobiography
