Nigel Norris - Böcker

Even though the curriculum can be tightly specified and controlled by strong accountability mechanisms, it is teachers who decisively shape the educational experiences of children and young people at school. Bringing together seminal papers from the Cambridge Journal of Education around the theme of curriculum and the teacher, this book explores the changing conceptions of curriculum and teaching and the changing role of the teacher in curriculum development and delivery. The book is organised around three major themes: Taking its lead from Lawrence Stenhouse, Part One looks at ‘defining the curriculum problem’ from a variety of perspectives and includes papers from some of the most influential curriculum theorists over the last thirty years. Part Two explores the framing of new orders of educational experience. It has papers from leading educational thinkers who have contributed to debates about how to make education more inclusive, humane, liberating, creative and educational. Part Three is focused on teachers and teaching. It offers a selection of papers from significant scholars in the field reflecting on the experience of teaching and how it is personally as well as socially constructed and theorised. The papers are drawn from important and eventful periods of educational history spanning the curriculum reform movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the present age of surveillance, accountability and control. A specially written Introduction contextualises the papers.Part of the Routledge Education Heritage series, Curriculum and the Teacher presents landmark texts from the Cambridge Journal of Education, offering a wealth of material for students and researchers in education.

Lawrence Stenhouse was one of the most distinguished, original and influential educationalists of his generation. His theories about curriculum, curriculum development, pedagogy, teacher research, and research as a basis for teaching remain compelling and fresh and continue to be a counterpoint to instrumental and technocratic thinking in education. In this book, renowned educationalists describe Stenhouse’s contribution to education, explore the contemporary relevance of his thinking and bring his work and legacy to the attention of a wide range of students, teachers, teacher educators and others involved in education.Stenhouse saw the primary aim of education as the development of individuality through a creative and critical engagement with culture. He was an early advocate of inclusive education and was committed to making available to all pupils an education that was challenging and empowering. For Stenhouse many of the problems of education stemmed not so much from its content as from the terms and conditions under which students were required to access it. Consequently he pioneered an approach to curriculum reform that stressed the quality of the educational process and the values that defined it, as opposed to ‘rational curriculum planning’, which stressed the pre-specification of measureable learning outcomes. Stenhouse devised the curriculum reform movement’s most ambitious strategy, ‘the process model’, and was its principal theorist. His idea of ‘the teacher as researcher’ lay at the heart of this strategy as the means by which the values that define a worthwhile educational process could be progressively realized by teachers in concrete forms of action within their classrooms and schools.What marked out Stenhouse’s unique contribution to the field of curriculum was his distinctive conceptualisation of the relationship between the teacher (authority), the learner (autonomy) and the subject matter (understanding). Founded on his epistemological scepticism and forged in his encounters with expertly discerning teachers who valued and nurtured the intellectual independence of students, Stenhouse acquired an acute appreciation of the ways in which teaching enhances or inhibits, develops or displaces the potential for autonomous thinking of students. He changed the relationship between curriculum theory, educational research and teachers; placing teachers right at the heart of the curriculum development process and the teacher as researcher at the heart of teacher professionalism.

In our reforming public institutions it sometimes feels as though the very ground of social and political contracts is shifting. The economic revolution embraced by neo-liberals and neo-conservatives is paralleled by a governance revolution in those same institutions which were designed to protect us from historical swings and ideological roundabouts. Our public institutions - for the most part the public sector and its professional groups - in the eyes of some provided stability, while for others they were a brake on change. Now, however, they have become conduits for political change and reform. We live in an institutional world now dubbed the New Public Management (NPM). In this new landscape evaluators might have to think afresh about how to position ourselves in relation to institutional ethics and the pursuit of social justice. In this volume contributors give us a start in thinking through such a repositioning, some within the values framework of NPM, others as external observers.