Changing the curriculum

Changing a curriculum is a very complicated process. It is not just a matter of adding a subject here and removing a subject there. It is not even just a process of revising a particular syllabus or updating it or using a different teaching strategy.

In order to understand how complicated designing a curriculum is, let us take a simple example.

In what year of the educational cycle should we teach human reproduction? Clearly, we cannot wait until students are 18 years old, because they could legally get married by that time. On the other hand, to take a non-controversial method encouraged by the Catholic Church, there is no point teaching the rhythm method to children who have not yet reached puberty. How old should children be when we discuss anatomy and physiology in class? What grade level would they be in when they are at that age?

Here you can see that the issue of whether a child should be in Grade 1 at age 4, 5, or 6 involves looking ahead to the time they will become parents. For the sake of the example, let us say we decide that we should teach family planning to 17-year-olds. In the current cycle with six-year-olds in Grade 1, the children would likely be in Second Year College. In the planned 12-year cycle, they would be in the last year of High School. Who will worry about responsible parenthood? DepEd or CHED? We immediately face pedagogical and bureaucratic issues.

When should students learn about pedophilia? When should they learn about the ethical implications of premarital sex, contraception, and abortion? In fact, we would have to decide a prior question: should schools teach human reproduction at all or should we leave it all up to parents or to human instinct? Even more prior than that is the philosophy of teaching: are teachers surrogate parents? (In the old days, we called that “in loco parentis,” or taking the place of parents whose children are in school.)

If we expand the topic a bit, we would have to decide when to take up issues such as overpopulation, stem cell research, divorce, even citizenship and nationalism (should pregnant women try to migrate to the US in order to have their children born Americans?).

That is only one of several areas of learning that we have to worry about when we design a curriculum.

Unfortunately for teachers, the world is rapidly changing. Technology and climate change are only two of the major factors why teachers cannot merely pass on to their students what they learned when they themselves were in school. Before the 21st century, the Department of Education (DepEd) would take ten years or so to change the curriculum. Today, a curriculum, no matter how well put together, becomes outdated in much earlier than ten years.

When a curriculum becomes outdated, we (not just teachers, but also parents and students) have to get together to revise it. There are many steps we have to take.

For example, we have to begin by figuring out which elements of the current curriculum are already outdated.

Let us take another simple example – the curriculum for teaching English to Filipinos. There have been a number of major changes in the English language itself. For one thing, linguists now recognize several major varieties of English, including Philippine English. (Several books on Philippine English have been published, including a dictionary.) There is now no “standard English” that may be said to be universally correct. (A simple example is “Ateneo beat FEU,” which is correct in the UK but wrong in the USA. In case it is the other way around this afternoon, make that “FEU beat Ateneo.”)

Linguists have also realized that usage has changed a lot of old grammatical rules. A simple example is the previously ungrammatical “Everyone had their own idea,” which is considered today as perfectly correct. The older form, “Everyone had his own idea,” is now considered unacceptable, due to its implication that women are not part of the human race.

Because we have to teach according to what we know, we cannot teach English the way we used to. We have to change minimum learning competencies, lesson plans, examinations, outcomes, textbooks, even teacher training, because research forces us to do so. We also cannot change just the teaching of English in college. We have to change the teaching of English at the elementary and high school levels, because we cannot teach Grade 6 students that “his” refers to both male and female and then tell them when they reach college that we lied.

That is just English. Also changing rapidly today is the way we should be teaching Filipino, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, and so on. (To be continued)

TEACHING TIP OF THE WEEK. Here is an activity recommended by the University of California, San Diego:

“Student-Generated Questions: Ask students to provide questions for discussion. These can be written out beforehand, or generated in brief small group sessions during class. Such questions can also be the basis for review sessions. In science or math classes, students can create problems for each other to solve, which helps them understand key concepts behind problem-solving techniques.”