Curriculum and Teacher Leadership Development

• In Event: 32.022 - Bridging Educational Leadership and Curriculum Theory/Didaktik for Achieving Educational Opportunity in an Era of Globopolitanism

Abstract

Objectives or purpose. This paper presents a new definition of curriculum as a constructive alternative to the Tyler Rationale that may inform teacher leadership development and practice.

Perspectives or theoretical framework. The Tyler Rationale represents the dominant curriculum development approach frequently underlying reductionist, instrumental curriculum reforms across the U.S. Our mission for teacher leadership, therefore, is to intervene in what has been and continues to be historically ineffective, top-down bureaucracies that have reproduced social inequalities. We intentionally interrupt the dominant discourse of teacher leadership with a vision for what can be made possible by curriculum-based teacher leaders who truly take on the adaptive challenge of acting as lead professionals with nuanced understandings of curriculum and pedagogy that are not ahistorical, amoral, or apolitical. Our intervention imagines emerging, powerful, ethical communities enacting a very specific curriculum-based definition of teacher leadership one that stands in striking contrast to the growing number of teacher leader frameworks currently being promoted across the United States. Our definition of teacher leadership is: Teacher leaders are committed to work as democratic visionaries, colleagues, and pedagogical artists through disciplined study and practice, and they embrace the personal journeys of becoming/embodying that this work entails. In this article, “curriculum” will be defined as the deep-seated study and practice of the relationships between the what, the how, and the why of educational courses of action. Building on this definition of curriculum, ‘good’ curriculum work is interpreted as the study and practice of the relationship between educational courses of action and democratic ethics, particularly as informed by the writings of the great American educational philosopher, John Dewey (1916, 1984, 2013a/1897, 2013/1952).

Methods and data sources. This paper begins with a description of an action research approach utilized to refine a constructive alternative to the Ralph Tyler Rationale (1949), which is still the paradigmatic exemplar for conceptions of curriculum development (Null, 2008; Walker & Soltis, 2009). A Kent State University (KSU) graduate course, entitled “Fundamentals of Curriculum,” (FoC) has served as the de facto research laboratory since 1991. Data sources include narratives as well as artifacts created by students in the class.

Substantiated conclusions. This chapter presents interpretations of teacher and administrative leadership that emerge out of 25 years of action research in a graduate course that addresses the fundamentals of curriculum.

Scientific or scholarly significance. In conclusion, we argue that our challenge to the Tyler Rationale in the Fundamentals of Curriculum approach is significant for the development of individual teacher leaders / participants and for democratic societies. We ask: What if this FoC course never existed? What if the teachers and administrators who enrolled in the course were introduced instead to an uncritical appraisal of Tylerian fundamentals? In more general terms, what if societies with democratic aspirations didn’t have critically astute, ethically aware educators to advance their hopes and visions?

Authors

• Daniel J Castner, Bellarmine University

• Jennifer Schneider, Kent State University

• James G. Henderson, Kent State University