Decision-making in SLE Curriculum and Program Design

1. Decision-making in SLE Curriculum and Program Design Douglas Fleming Faculty of Education University of Ottawa

2. To what degree should teachers be curriculum designers? Clark (1987) outlined three value systems usually used to answer this question in general education: • classical humanism (teachers are expected to implement the curricula recommended by administrators); • reconstructionism (teachers are expected to implement curricula designed by experts); and • progressivism (teachers are expected to design their own school-based curricula).

3. Johnson (1989) was among the first modern SLE theorists to adopt the broader concept of curriculum that we discussed earlier. Moreover, he brought to the field the concept of curriculum implementation as being a set of decision-making processes. He defined curriculum as including “all the relevant decision-making processes of all participants” (1989, p.1).

4. Johnson (1989) conceived of three approaches to how participants are assigned roles in curriculum implementation: • specialist (top-down hierarchical chain of command); • learner-centered (all participants are involved at every stage of decision making); • integrated (all participants have an awareness of all the decisions to be made, but have responsibility only in the areas in which they are best qualified).

5. But who assigns these roles? • Stern (1992) made a distinction between decisions made at the policy level (experts who do the overall planning and decision making) and the practical action level (classroom teachers who decide on specific learning activities); • This reflects a traditional hierarchical distinction between: • syllabus design (the selection and grading of linguistic and experiential content) and • methodology (the selection, sequencing and delivery of learning tasks and activities); Nunan (1991)

6. Markee’s (1997) more recent work delegates different levels of responsibilities for curriculum innovation: • Long-term strategic planning is the purview of project directors or administrators; • Medium-term tactical planning is produced through negotiation between teachers and administrators; • Short-term operational planning is developed through negotiations between teachers and students. • “the program director and the teachers negotiate the content and methodology of materials, which yields a syllabus of task-based units. Teachers try these units in class and negotiate unit content and methodology further with students” (Markee, 1997, p.24).

7. Breen (1984), however, contended that these distinctions about curriculum decision-making roles are no longer valid in the context of communicative language teaching; • teachers organize activities that actively engage students in communicating in the target language; • thus, the activity of learning the language has become as important as the language itself; • these activities form the curriculum, rather than a pre-ordained syllabus of language items; • SLE curriculum designers must therefore “give priority to the changing processes of learning and the potential of the classroom” (Breen, 1984, p.52).

8. This is especially true in the context of pedagogical tasks (one our colleagues will discuss tasks in more detail later). Suffice to say here: • Tasks have been commonly employed ever since experiential learning was established in general education (see Dewey and Freire). However, the links between tasks, assessment and the communicative approach are relatively recent in SLE. • “fluency in the communicative process can only develop within a task-orientated teaching, one which provides actual meaning by focusing on tasks to be mediated through language, and where success or failure is seen to be judged in terms of whether or not these tasks are performed. (Johnson, 1979, p. 200)

9. Note the ideological issues at play here: • Pennycook (1989) pointed out that these curriculum planning hierarchies have helped maintain inequalities between ESL theorists and practitioners. • Do these hierarchies create hidden curricula (Jackson, 1968) in that they encapsulate privileged bodies of content and methods meant to socialize learners (and teachers). • These are examples of governmentality (Foucault, 1978), where teachers are governed less through centralized, top-down authority than managed more through ostensibly non-political micro-practices (Morgan & Fleming, 2009).