Curriculum Development

CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT:DYNAMIC PROCESS

Curriculum development is not an exact science. In most cases, it is a dynamic process that
involves many people, often with different priorities, vested interest and needs. Priorities of
politicians and parents can be very different, as can the priorities of teachers and employers. But
it can be argued that each of these groups has a legitimate interest in what is included in the
curriculum, and most significantly, in its outputs. Curriculum has been a rich source of research
and theory for many decades. While the debate has been complex and robust; it has resulted, at
least in English-speaking countries in two prominent models of curriculum development being
proposed;

1. objectives – sequential, rational or behavioral model

2. interactive or dynamic

OBJECTIVE MODEL Conceptualizes the curriculum development as a sequential series of

stages

1. stating objectives
2. selecting learning experiences or subject
3. organizing learning experiences or subject
4. evaluating – whether objectives have been met

INTERACTIVE MODEL Conceptualizes curriculum development as a less predictable process

which can begin with any element or stage. Is continuing process of interaction, refinement, and
review.

THE CURRICULUM RESOURCE PACK DEVELOPMENT PROJECT Acknowledge the

legitimacy of both curriculum development models. It advocates a thoughtful analysis of the
context and a consideration of the needs and interest of all stakeholders, within broad range of
stages

IMPERATIVES
“every education system works within its own parameters and traditions, and is guided by its
own imperatives, some possibilities are

1. development of healthy, responsible and skilled citizens

2. socio-economic development and improvement of living standards
3. international competitiveness and global integration
4. social stability and national cohesion
5. economic liberalization
6. political transaction
7. post conflict reconciliation and social reconstruction
CONTEXTUALIZED IMPERATIVES
Which imperative apply to our respective context?
(we have examples from the Curriculum Reform Process in different countries, with its
challenges and responses)

Traditionally, curriculum was often thought of as product; documents that describe content –
what teachers should teach.

Curriculum Development
DepEd issues Implementing rules of Kindergarten Act
MANILA, Philippines - To ensure that the unique needs of diverse learners will be addressed;
the Kindergarten Education General Curriculum will cater to the needs of pupils with special
needs and disabilities and create a catch-up program for children under difficult circumstances.
Kindergarten education was institutionalized as part of basic education and was implemented
partially in school year 2011-2012. It was made mandatory and compulsory for entrance to
Grade 1.
The general kindergarten program is the 10-month program provided to children who are at least
five years old in elementary schools using thematic and integrative curriculum to ensure the
development of foundation skills among children to prepare them for Grade 1.
Republic Act (RA) 10157, otherwise known as “The Kindergarten Education Act,” provides that
the curriculum is designed to cater to the needs of the learners with special needs or children who
are gifted, those with disabilities, and other diverse learners by adopting services in addition to
the standards provided, such as Head start Program for the Gifted, Early Intervention Program
for Children with Disabilities, Early Intervention Program for Children with Disabilities,
Kindergarten Madrasah Program (KMP), Indigenous People (IP) Education, and Catch-Up
Program for Children under Especially Difficult Circumstances.
The Head start Program for the Gifted is a comprehensive program for the gifted and talented
pupils in public elementary schools designed to address the educational, aesthetic, and social
needs of children who manifest superior intelligence beyond their age.
The Early Intervention Program for Children with Disabilities is designed for children who are
identified with special educational needs. The program provides services that will arrest further
handicapping conditions of children with disabilities. This intervention could either be home-,
school-, or community-based.
For Muslim pupils enrolled in public schools, the Kindergarten Madrasah Program (KMP)
requires providing the children with Arabic Language and Islamic Values Education (ALIVE)
classes, as well as those in private madaris using the Standard Madrasah Curriculum prescribed
by the Department of Education.
The Indigenous Peoples Education, on the other hand, ensures the preservation, recognition,
promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous people, their ancestral domain, cultural
identity and heritage. It incorporates special needs, histories, identities, languages, indigenous
knowledge, systems and practices, and other aspects of their culture, as well as their social,
economic, and cultural priorities and aspirations.
The Catch-up Program for Children under Especially Difficult Circumstances is for children six
years old and above under especially difficult circumstances, such as, but not limited to, chronic
illness, displaced children due to armed conflict, urban resettlement, disasters and child labor
practice, who are not able to finish the General Kindergarten Program.

The implementing rules and regulations of RA 10157 also provide that the mother tongue of the
learners shall be the primary medium of instruction for teaching and learning in the kindergarten
level in public schools. However, exceptions shall be made when the pupils in the kindergarten
classroom have a different mother tongue or when the teacher does not speak the mother tongue
of the pupils.
KEY ISSUES IN PHILIPPINE EDUCATION

Literacy rate in the Philippines has improved a lot over the last few years- from 72 percent in
1960 to 94 percent in 1990. This is attributed to the increase in both the number of schools built
and the level of enrollment in these schools.The number of schools grew rapidly in all three
levels - elementary, secondary, and tertiary. From the mid-1960s up to the early 1990, there was
an increase of 58 percent in the elementary schools and 362 percent in the tertiary schools. For
the same period, enrollment in all three levels also rose by 120 percent. More than 90 percent of
the elementary schools and 60 percent of the secondary schools are publicly owned. However,
only 28 percent of the tertiary schools are publicly owned.A big percentage of tertiary-level
students enroll in and finish commerce and business management courses. Table 1 shows the
distribution of courses taken, based on School Year 1990-1991. Note that the difference between
the number of enrollees in the commerce and business courses and in the engineering and
technology courses may be small - 29.2 percent for commerce and business and 20.3 percent for
engineering and technology. However, the gap widens in terms of the number of graduates for
the said courses. TABLE 1: TERTIARY ENROLLMENT AND GRADUATION BY FIELD OF
STUDY. SY 1990-1991 | FIELD OF STUDY | ENROLLMENT | GRADUATION | | No. | % |
No. | % | Arts and Sciences | 196,711 | 14.6 | 29,961 | 13.6 | Teacher Training & Education |
242,828 | 18.0 | 34,279 | 15.5 | Engineering & Technology | 273,408 | 20.3 | 32,402 | 14.7 |
Medical and Health - related Programs | 176,252 | 13.1 | 34,868 | 15.8 | Commerce/Business
Management | 392,958 | 29.2 | 79,827 | 36.1 | Agriculture, Forestry, Fishery, and Veterinary
Medicine | 43,458 | 3.2 | 7,390 | 3.3 | Law | 20,405 | 1.5 | 2,111 | 1.0 | Religion / Theology | 1,695
| 0.1 | 209 | 0.1 | TOTAL | 1,347,715 | 100.0 | 221,047 | 100.0 |
On gender distribution, female students have very high representation in all three levels. At the
elementary level, male and female students are almost equally represented. But female
enrollment exceeds that of the male at the secondary and tertiary levels . Also, boys have higher
rates of failures, dropouts, and repetition in both elementary and secondary levels.Aside from the
numbers presented above, which are impressive, there is also a need to look closely and resolve
the following important issues: 1) quality of education 2) affordability of education 3) goverment
budget for education; and 4) education mismatch. Quality - There was a decline in the quality of
the Philippine education, especially at the elementary and secondary levels. For example, the
results of standard tests conducted among elementary and high school students, as well as in the
National College of Entrance Examination for college students, were way below the target mean
score.Affordability - There is also a big disparity in educational achievements across social
groups. For example, the socioeconomically disadvantaged students have higher dropout rates,
especially in the elementary level. And most of the freshmen students at the tertiary level come
from relatively well-off families.Budget - The Philippine Constitution has mandated the
government to allocate the highest proportion of its budget to education. However, the
Philippines still has one of the lowest budget allocations to education among the ASEAN
countries.Mismatch - There is a large proportion of "mismatch" between training and actual jobs.
This is the major problem at the tertiary level and it is also the cause of the existence of a large
group of educated unemployed or underemployed.The following are some of the reforms
proposed:Upgrade the teachers' salary scale. Teachers have been underpaid; thus there is very
little incentive for most of them to take up advanced trainings.Amend the current system of
budgeting for education across regions, which is based on participation rates and units costs. This
clearly favors the more developed regions. There is a need to provide more allocation to lagging
regions to narrow the disparity across regions.Stop the current practice of subsidizing state
universities and colleges to enhance access. This may not be the best way to promote equity. An
expanded scholarship program, giving more focus and priority to the poor, maybe more
equitable.Get all the leaders in business and industry to become actively involved in higher
education; this is aimed at addressing the mismatch problem. In addition, carry out a selective
admission policy, i.e., installing mechanisms to reduce enrollment in oversubscribed courses and
promoting enrollment in undersubscribed ones.Develop a rationalized apprenticeship program
with heavy inputs from the private sector. Furthermore, transfer the control of technical training
to industry groups which are more attuned to the needs of business and industryThe new
challenge of the mother tongues: the future of Philippine postcolonial language politics
Abstract
For much of postcolonial language politics around the world, the fight has largely been between
a foreign language and (a) dominant local language(s). This is true in the Philippines where the
debates have focused on English and Filipino, the Tagalog-based national language. In recent
years, however, the mother tongues have posed a challenge to the ideological structure of the
debates. Although local languages have long been acknowledged as positively contributing to the
enhancement of learning in school, they have been co-opted mostly as a nationalist argument
against English, American (neo)colonialism and imperialist globalization. The current initiatives
to establish mother tongue-based education reconfigure the terms of engagement in Philippine
postcolonial language politics: it must account for the fact that the mother tongues could be the
rightful media of instruction. In the process, it must tease out issues concerning the decoupling of
Filipino as the national language and Filipino as a/the medium of instruction, and deal with the
politics of inclusion and exclusion in “bilingual” and
“multilingual’” education. Nevertheless, this paper ends with a general critique of language
debates in the country, arguing that “content” has been sidelined in much of the discussion. The
future of postcolonial language politics in the Philippines should not be about language per se,
but about how the entanglements of language with the larger
(neo)colonial infrastructures of education where medium, substance and structures are needed to
advance the nationalist imagining of the multilingual nation.INTRODUCTION
If one is to take stock of work done in postcolonial language politics around the world (e.g.,
debates, policy-making practices, research), the problem has been expressed essentially in terms
of the tension between imperialist languages and local languages More often than not, the
question has either been how to de-center the colonial/imperial languages from social life or how
to slowly (re)introduce the mother tongues into the centers of power in society such as political
governance and the educational system.
In this paper, the role of mother tongues in Philippine postcolonial language politics will be
explored. Specifically, it will trace the reconfiguring of language politics in the country in recent
years through an investigation of a range of mother tongue initiatives and discourses from
national level policy debates to grassroots projects around the country. The paper will show that,
while the argument for mother tongues in education and social development is definitely not
new, recent multi-sectoral, multi-level work in the area has opened up possibilities of a different
discursive configuration of language politics in the country. These are the displacement of
English and
Filipino as media of instruction, the decoupling of Filipino as national language and as medium
of instruction, and the re-mapping of the “nation” through the supposedly more inclusive mother
tongues. The paper, however, also argues that postcolonial language politics in the Philippines
should not be about language per se, but about the entanglements of language with the larger
(neo)colonial infrastructures of education where medium, substance and structures are needed to
advance the nationalist imagining of the multilingual nation.MOTHER TONGUE
INSTRUCTION AROUND THE WORLD
The literature on the use of the mother tongues or the first languages of learners has been
overwhelmingly positive. The Global Monitoring Report of UNESCO (Education for All)
summarizes the rich field thus far:
The choice of the language of instruction used in school is of utmost importance.
Initial instruction in the learner’s first language improves learning outcomes and reduces
subsequent grade repetition and dropout rates. (17)
However, this seemingly unproblematic fact about mother tongues becomes a highly politicized
argument if it is located in specific sociopolitical contexts. Indeed, the role of mother tongues in
society and education depends on whose society and education we are talking about.
Benson, for example, notes that in many ex-British colonies mother tongue schooling has been a
historical by-product of separate and unequal development, for example the institutionalization
of Bantu education during the apartheid era of South Africa, although pedagogical strategies
emerging from this discriminatory practice have become potential agents of change towards
equitable education. Similarly, mother tongues have served as compensatory tools to reverse the
trend of illiteracy and high school dropout rates in many marginalized communities and
countries around the world, for example in Guatemala where only less than half of its rural Maya
language speaking population is enrolled in school and further half drops out after first grade.
Moreover, still according to Benson, mother tongues have also served as representations of new
political ideologies of many societies around the world, for example the explicit political valuing
of pluralism in the constitutions of Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia; while clearly
educational development objectives drive the institutionalization of mother tongue instruction
such as the ones used in Mozambique, Nigeria, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea.
The point here is that, while mother tongue instruction has proved to be pedagogically sound, its
valuing differs across communities and societies. The many layers of ideology and politics which
undergird it reveal, in particular, a specific politics of language and education and, in general, a
sociopolitical landscape characterized by tension between inclusionary and exclusionary policies.
Mother tongue instruction does not and cannot happen in a vacuum; even as it argues for its
superiority over other modes of instruction, it is enmeshed in many other social issues.
Unpacking these issues surrounding mother tongue instruction can reveal rich information about
postcolonial language politics in many societies today.Perhaps then even a more fundamental
question should be this: do we need a national language?
There are, however, more questions that need to be asked, the most critical of which is perhaps
the issue of content in Philippine education. If we scrutinize the network of issues concerning
bilingual and multilingual education in the country, much discussion revolves around the
(re)placement and (dis)placement of languages in schools as part of the country’s struggle with
its (neo)colonial legacies. This does not mean that the role of content has not been part of the
discussion; in the early 1960s and 1970s, the “mis-education” of the Filipino people (R.
Constantino) was at the core of the nationalist argument against English and, in a more general
sense, against the endemic colonial trappings of Philippine society. The bilingual education
policy of 1974 thus became the first formal education platform to accommodate a local language,
P/Filipino, as a medium of instruction, together with English, as a political solution to the
enduring problem of
(neo)colonialism in the country. Yet, the same bilingual education infrastructure was used by the
Marcos dictatorship to consolidate its power through the propagation of its myths and through
the institutionalization of neoliberal “manpower” programs put in place by its acquiescence to
dictates of US-led global economic institutions such as the World Bank (Bello, Kinley, and
Elinson;
Schirmer and Shalom).
Similarly, at the same time when bilingual education was re-affirmed and Filipino was installed
as the national language in the post-Marcos 1987 Constitution, Philippine education continued to
be plagued by imperialist content. In a pioneering research, Canieso-Doronilla
(The Limits of Education Change 74) found among pupil-subjects of her study an absence of
ethnocentric affiliation with Filipino nationality, pride of country, support of nationalism before
internationalism/globalism, and commitment to decolonization and national self-reliance.
Canieso-
Doronilla concludes that it “is fair to say that the young respondents have as yet no conception of
what it means to be a Filipino, identifying instead with the characteristics and interests of other
nationalities, particularly American” (74) (see also Mulder; L. Constantino). In short,
postcolonial language politics must take into greater consideration the role of content in
Philippine education.CONCLUSION
As late as 2003 during which former President Gloria Arroyo issued a memorandum that would
put English back as the “sole” medium of instruction in the country, the issues raised did not
substantially advance the ideological structure of the debates. Those in favor of English as the
main language of instruction justified it on grounds that English is the language of globalization,
social mobility and global competitiveness; those against it (thus in favor of the “bilingual”
status quo) argued that Filipino, the mother tongue and the national language, would be more
effective in facilitating learning among pupils and in fostering national unity and a nationalist
consciousness.
The charge against Filipino came from “non-Tagalog” critics who claimed that Filipino is
divisive and is indicative of Tagalog imperialism. The ideological genealogies of these
arguments can be traced back to the linguistic battles of the 1930s, early 1970s, and mid 1980s
during which questions about national language and medium of instruction framed the debates.
In all of these, the “mother tongue” argument was central to many positions.
The recent challenge of the mother tongues, however, substantially reconfigures the terms of
engagement in postcolonial language politics. Who can imagine the nation and how can this be
done through bilingual (English and Filipino, the national language) or multilingual education
(MLE)?
Crucially, it is also important not to forget the polemics of content vis-à-vis the role of language
in the reconfiguration of such politics. It should likewise account for what can be imagined in the
unrelenting postcolonial project of (re)making the Philippine nation. The medium and substance
of nationalism should animate the future of postcolonial language politics in the country.. |

Curriculum Development
CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT AS A POLITICAL AND TECHNICAL ACTIVITY

Introduction Curriculum development is “a collective and intentional process or activity directed

at beneficial curriculum change”. Curriculum development involves making basic decisions as to
who will partake in the curriculum decision-making process and how it will proceed The
decisions made, however, are both political and technical depending on the individual stages.
The stages of the curriculum development process include planning, designing, implementation
and evaluation. Curriculum development as a political activity Curriculum development can be
considered as partly political because the planning stage of the curriculum development process
is said to be a lay political activity. Curriculum planning, especially at the national level is
considered to be a political activity due to the reasons below. First and foremost, curriculum
planning is designed to ensure adequate representation of the opinions of all the major
stakeholders in education. In curriculum planning, the emphasis is on the interest of the people
who matter most in education. For instance, teachers, students, parents and religious bodies
among others who are stakeholders are represented at the planning stage not because of their
competence or technical know-how but because of their interest. Furthermore, the government of
the day seeks to promote its economic and political development agenda through education. The
government would always want the curriculum or the educational system to be in line with their
political manifesto, hence their participation in the planning process. Again, the government as a
major financier of public education would want to get value for its money. In addition, the
various stakeholder groups compete among themselves in order to get their agenda into the
national curriculum. These stakeholders compete among themselves by articulating their views,
making cases and seeking the support of other representatives in the course of their deliberations.
Curriculum development as a technical activity Curriculum development is also considered as
partly technical because the design stage of the curriculum development process is said to be a
technical activity. Curriculum design, especially in a centralized system is considered to be a
technical activity due to the reasons below. First and foremost, the curriculum design process
involves making technical decisions with regard to the instructional programmes of the school.
This stage of the curriculum development process is undertaken by experts drawn from relevant
areas so far as school instructional programmes are concerned. Pratt (1980) for instance believes
that curriculum design work should be undertaken by experts in the following six core areas:  
    subject matter, pedagogy, measurement and evaluation, curriculum design, organizational
skills and technical writing

In addition, the design process requires working out the fine details of the national educational
plan for the purpose of implementation in the school and classroom on a day to day basis. The
outputs of the curriculum design process include materials and guidelines for actualizing the
national educational plan obtained during the curriculum planning stage. These materials and
guidelines include syllabuses, text books, lesson note books, academic calendar and school time
table among others. These materials and guidelines are considered as the fine details of the
national educational plan. Conclusion Curriculum development involves political decision
making at the planning stage and technical decision making at the design stage. Again,
membership of the curriculum planning team is based on representation of interests and opinions
where as that of curriculum design is based on technical competence. Therefore curriculum
development is partly political and partly technical.