What is Curriculum?

For me, as a teacher, curriculum is like planning and hosting a wedding. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of ‘curriculum’ is “the courses offered by an educational institution” and of ‘wedding’ is “a marriage ceremony usually with its accompanying festivities”. They are extremely broad definitions and present the idea of one constant in each situation; in a curriculum there is education involved, and in a wedding some formal ritual occurs. You expect that there are a number of elements that could take place in some fashion:

Creating a guest list = creating a learning community
Wedding ceremony with Canadian legal requirements and possibly church requirements (yes, the church encourages that there be a community witnessing) = the prescribed provincial/state requirements including testing with the possibility of some other curriculum included (such as the International Baccalaureate)
The schedule of events (ceremony, reception, meal, dance, party, etc.) = the learning experiences planned
Speeches = Feedback
Wedding pictures = documentation of achievements, learning experiences, feedback, and celebration of learning.
Guests gathering and interacting = Group work and interactions between learners and teachers

Bare Bones

Many people do not consider everything I included in my list as part of curriculum. Egan defines curriculum as the study of any and all educational phenomena. Yet you need to know your guests/learners in order to effectively plan and present your wedding/curriculum. The legal bare bones is that you can be married with only 2 witnesses. Many people consider a particular textbook or the ministry guidelines to be the curriculum. As a trained teacher, you need to take those bare bones and create something that will engage your learners and encourage them to be involved – how many weddings are planned where people only attend the oath-taking part of the ceremony and none of the festivities? Curriculum as a document should be a basic list of topics, subject skills and soft skills that can be adapted to the context of a classroom situation just as a wedding has to be carried out with just the legal requirements. Too much prescription is not useful, but too much vagueness is also useless. From the view of the learners/guests, there needs to be much more than these bare bones.

Filling the Frame

Planning a wedding for my daughter and her partner and the limited Covid guest list was very different than the original plan for a larger guest list which would be very different from the wedding Joanna and her partner planned for June 30th as opposed to the wedding they had planned for April. Yet, no matter how much you plan and think ahead of possible alternatives, the reality will be slightly different. The same goes in the classroom. I have taught private music students as well as in schools for over thirty years and although some of the high school and middle school math, information processing, band, choir and Christian ethics (with a smattering of science and accounting thrown in) were the exact same courses, I cannot say they were presented the same or even covered the exact same concepts or learning objectives. You can plan and postulate, but when you get your ‘guests’ in front of you, the ‘atmosphere’ affects what can be accomplished. The context affects the presentation of the content. I found there was an equal amount of similarity between years of teaching the same course as there was between teaching the same year of students from Saskatchewan to British Columbia curriculum (which granted, was similar for mathematics and music but wildly out of date in a variety of ways for information processing/design courses). Even our well-planned wedding celebration changed significantly due to drizzling rain and the relaxed nature of our guests. We were able to incorporate some of the frame while making a consistent effort to remove and edit the parts of it that were not working for us, just the way you need to work a curriculum according to Blades.

For me, hosting a wedding or presenting a curriculum needs to include a flexible plan so reaction to the immediate context is possible. You do not want to lose the voices of your guests or your students because this diminishes their joy and engagement in the experience.

Resources

Blades, D. (1997) Procedures of Power in a Curriculum Discourse: Conversations from Home. JCT, 11(4), 125-155

Egan, K. (2003) What is Curriculum? Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(1), 9-16.