Teaching in Higher Education, Vol. 6, No.

3, 2001

Complexity and Curriculum: a

process approach to
curriculum-making
PETER T. KNIGHT
Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK

ABSTRACT It is argued that the complex learning with which higher education institutions are
concerned is best promoted by coherent curricula. However, curriculum coherence is not
widespread. Outcomes-led rational curriculum planning offers one way of creating coherent
curricula, but it is argued that, despite its appeal, it is a poor approach to adopt. An alternative,
process model of curriculum creation is described and claims are made about the advantages it
can have as an approach to planning coherent learning programmes.

Complexity and Coherence

Higher education is about complex learning. Amongst other things it is about
unending disputes, subtle concepts, large amounts of information to be organised
and remembered, and emerging understandings of the nature or structure of the
subject or area itself. Given Bruner’s (1966) in uential proposition that some
intellectually respectable form of any subject could be presented to any child at any
age, it is this complexity that especially distinguishes university study from school
study. The expectation that higher education will help students to become more
autonomous compounds that complexity and draws attention to curriculum schol-
ars’ view that curriculum is more than just content. It can be deŽ ned as a set of
purposeful, intended experiences. It may be divided into at least four parts: content,
organisation, learning and teaching methods, and assessment (Helsby, 1999). It
takes at least three forms: the planned curriculum, the created curriculum (often
wrongly called the ‘delivered’ curriculum), and the understood curriculum (often
misleadingly called the ‘received’ curriculum). These distinctions will become more
important as the argument develops.
In addition to the complexities of teaching content and encouraging autonomy,
higher education institutions (HEIs), often at the behest of governments, have
committed themselves to the double complexity of promoting a host of skills and
qualities as well.
For example:

· The Open University has sponsored work on six ‘key’ skills: communication,

ISSN 1356-2517 (print)/ISSN 1470-1294 (online)/01/030369-13 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/13562510120061223
370 P. T. Knight

information technology, application of number; working with others; improving

own learning and performance; problem solving.
· Harvey and colleagues (1997) found that employers want graduates with:
knowledge; intellect; willingness to learn; self-management skills; communi-
cation skills; teamworking; interpersonal skills.
· The Association of Graduate Recruiters identiŽ es ‘career management skills
and effective learning skills’: self-awareness; self-promotion; exploring and
creating opportunities; action planning; networking; matching and decision-
making; negotiation; political awareness; coping with uncertainty; development
focus; transfer skills; self-conŽ dence.

Ambiguous though goals like these are, it is possible to be clear about some of the
conditions under which they are more likely to be realised. Time for plentiful
practice is needed if learners are to tune these new achievements and make them
versatile (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986). An implication is that curricula that sustain
complex learning ought to be coherent and progressive. One aspect of coherence
is that what is planned should be created (delivered) and that what has been created
should be understood (received). A second requires that curriculum content,
organisation, learning and teaching strategies, and assessment arrangements dovetail
with one another. It is increasingly appreciated that non-formal learning (Eraut,
2000) is very important and that it is wise to try and make the out-of-classroom
learning environment consistent with in-class activities, and to aim for a seamless
environment in which learning happens, formally and informally (Astin, 1997). A
third source of coherence is the key messages that pervade learning encounters,
constituting an intentional discourse about what matters and the ‘rules of the game’.
Progression means that the curriculum should be conceived so that Ž rst year
encounters are appropriate to novices and those in the Ž nal year to experts-in-the-
making.
The choice of ‘complex’ as the adjective to describe higher education’s ambi-
tions for students is a way of evoking the literature on complex systems. Of the
distinctive features of complex systems (Bryne, 1998; Cilliers, 1998), three are
particularly relevant here: they are indeterminate, non-linear and contingent. By
indeterminate, I mean that if we know exactly the state of a complex system now we
cannot (i) predict exactly how it will be at a future time and (ii) describe accurately
each point in the transition from now to then. By non-linear I mean that relatively
small changes, especially early on and before attractors are at work and cycles have
become established, can produce dramatically different and unpredictable out-
comes. Paradoxically, quite large changes may have slight effects. It follows that
whatever the similarities between the workings of different complex systems, their
histories and contingencies matter because speciŽ cs can turn out to be unexpectedly
powerful in non-linear systems. If this view has merit, then what is needed is an
approach to coherence that breaks with the discourses of learning outcomes, rational
curriculum planning, linear, simple systems and starts from the complexities of
learning.
 Complexity and Curriculum 371

Neither Coherence nor Progression?

Some North American commentators have argued that the undergraduate experi-
ence is unsatisfactory because professors pursue their own interests at everyone
else’s expense, using academic freedom as a licence for self-indulgence (Huber,
1992; Bercuson et al., 1997). Gaff & Ratcliffe’s Handbook of the Undergraduate
Curriculum (1996) is shot through with concern about the incoherence of American
curricula. In Britain, many HEIs have adopted modularised curricula in the name of
 exibility and student choice, but critics allege that they jeopardise curriculum
coherence (Bennett et al., 2000) and that high degrees of student choice spoil
planned progression. Further more, it is questionable whether universities really are
entities to be led: Huber (1992) reports the remark that a university is a collection
of departments held together by a central heating system, which resonates with the
view that large organisations may be described as ‘constellations of practice’, loose
associations of communities of practice. The literatures on communities of practice
(Brown & Duguid, 2000), actor network theory (Miettinen, 1999), and activity
systems (Trowler & Knight, 2000) challenge assumptions that universities are
entities. They also draw attention to the constructed, negotiated, contested, pro-
visional and often-complex nature of what happens in departments.
Many undergraduates have to create coherence out of curriculum disinte-
gration, although some do get a coherent curriculum planned with progression in
mind, especially in professional schools. Arguably, creating coherence is itself good
learning, but where some become sense-makers on a grand scale, others are like
 otsam in swirling waters. Since it is a necessary condition for expertise that learners
deploy their  edgling achievements in different settings for different purposes, it
follows that good curricula need to do more than permit happenstance to bring them
to threshold achievements. Bruner (1966) depicted good curriculum as a spiral of
repeated engagements to improve and deepen skills, concepts, attitudes and values,
and extend their reach. The spiral curriculum has coherence, progression and, I
claim, value. I am now going to:
(1) argue that some of forces for coherence are too weak to stimulate complex
coherence;
(2) criticise approaches to coherence that are based on:
· rational curriculum planning,
· on misbegotten metaphors of curriculum packages, delivery and recep-
tion,
· on impressive lists of learning outcomes, achievement criteria, bench-
mark statements and suchlike shibboleths;
(3) describe a practical way of creating coherent curricula.

Weak Cohesive Forces

There is no shortage of studies identifying things that should permeate higher
education practice and draw curriculum elements into a coherent relationship.
Pascarella & Terenzini (1991) and Astin (1997) have identiŽ ed characteristics of
372 P. T. Knight

HEIs that are favourable to student learning, with Astin saying that small, liberal arts
colleges are well placed to engage students consistently and coherently (Alverno
College in Milwaukee may be the best known to British readers). Chickering &
Gamson (1991) and Svinicki and colleagues (1996) have identiŽ ed principles that
make for coherence in the teaching and learning aspect of curriculum. There is
nothing wrong with those precept-centred approaches to coherence, but precepts
have to be implemented and to affect curriculum’s four parts (content, organisation,
teaching and learning methods, assessment) in its three forms (planned, created and
understood).
A second force for coherence is professional development intended to educate
faculty to apply the precepts effectively. Professional associations, such as POD
(USA), HERDSA (Australasia), SEDA (Britain) and STLHE (Canada) aim to
convince faculty of the importance of teaching and establish a discourse about good
practice. In the UK the new Institute for Learning and Teaching (ILT) does more
of the same. However, stimulating the communities of discourse that are harbingers
of coherence may be helpful but is not sufŽ cient. Consider the example of school-
based curriculum development as a 1980s means to raising educational stan-
dards.[1] It failed, and it showed that success depended on taking ideas, such as
those favoured by the associations, and using knowledge of curriculum-making to
apply them in context: ‘What members of the Ž eld of education in general and
curriculum in particular have increasingly come to realize is that given a competition
between the general and the particular, the particular will win every time’ (Eisner,
2000, p. 354). Promoting a discourse is not enough.
This recognition that contingency and context are important has in uenced
researchers into organisations who have become interested in the functions of
workgroups, activity systems and communities of practice. It can be seen in the view
that, ‘The department could be the principal agent for the purposeful reconstruction
of higher education’ (PHER, 1996, p. 2). However, it is not prudent to presume that
curriculum coherence will be achieved by making heads of department responsible
for it. Heads of department often have had little or no training as leaders, and work
in situations where taking a lead in curriculum matters would be unexpected and
perhaps unwelcome (Knight & Trowler, 2001). Furthermore, even if they were
well-placed to make a difference to the curriculum, their effectiveness would be
compromised by bad advice on what to do. That is the subject of the next section.

Rational Curriculum Planning

Rational curriculum planning (RCP) is a systemic approach that begins with
specifying goals, and proceeds to objectives, thence to curriculum, instruction,
assessment of learning, evaluation and such revisions as are needed to make the
system work better next time. Embedded in it is a commitment to efŽ ciency, since
things not listed as objectives should not be designed into curriculum and instruc-
tion. It can be presented as a logical way of proceeding, redolent of scientiŽ c
method. Like classical scientiŽ c method it assumes a determinate and linear universe
in which the specialnesses of setting are irritants that science should rise above.
 Complexity and Curriculum 373

Stenhouse (1975), one of the most in uential of British curriculum scholars and
Eisner (1985), an American counterpart, allowed that RCP could have a place in the
design of training, a process designed to achieve convergence, but argued that it had
little to offer education as processes stimulating divergence. They also doubted
whether complex learning, especially that to do with skills, qualities and beliefs,
could be captured by statements of learning objectives or outcomes[2]. Amongst
other things, they feared that RCP would skew attention to those things that could
be described in the determinate way of objectives, ‘delivered’ and ‘received’ so that
learning could be poured into the reductionist mould of training. Although their
critique has been in uential, victory has often gone to RCP because it has a
commonsense quality that Ž ts well with the managerialisms that have been sent to
the public sector and because it plays well as a populist political position. Yet it is
not as practicable as commonsense supposes. Three faults are:

1. Outcomes-led curriculum planning of the sort described above is problematic in

several ways. Even if the choice of goals were unproblematic (which it is not),
producing detailed outcomes is fraught. Some learning, especially complex
learning, is not easily reducible to precise statements predicting what the out-
comes will be. For example, if we say that an outcome of the undergraduate years
should be that learners will be able to work with a high degree of autonomy, it
is not clear what we really mean by ‘autonomy’ or by ‘a high degree’.
ClariŽ cation means complication which is why lists of outcomes grow like mould
and become unwieldy. Even long lists do not say anything about the reach of any
attainment: is this ‘autonomy’, howsoever it is deŽ ned, to be found only in
academic studies of a subject, or is it supposed to predict achievement in the
workplace, or in life in general, no matter whether situations are simple or
complex, familiar or unfamiliar? (What counts as ‘familiar’, ‘simple’ and such-
like?) Given the amount of evidence that cognition is both situated and generic
(Anderson et al., 2000), there are problems with context-free statements of
learning outcomes and with belief in ‘transferable’ skills. Besides, what reason is
there for thinking that the learning objectives are fair descriptions of what people
working in good faith will learn— developmental psychology has plenty to say
about the difference between logical sense (what we think ought to be the case)
and psychological sense (how people do think, feel and act)? Given these
problems, it follows that assessing achievement is hardly an objective, ‘scientiŽ c’
operation.
2. People do not plan ‘rationally’. There are several ways of making this point.
Weick (1995) is sceptical of the rational, Enlightenment story about planning.
He suggests that we frequently act before planning. ‘Plans’ are often rationalisa-
tions of what we have done and accounts of the situation in which we now Ž nd
ourselves: we walk the walk before talking the talk. Others talk about the futility
of planning in turbulent times. Those in uenced by complexity theories would
add that if educational systems are complex (Fullan, 1999; Lewin & Regine,
1999), then it is incongruous to suppose that planning, as it has been commonly
practised, has much to offer such indeterminate, non-linear systems.
374 P. T. Knight

There is a strong educational objection to rational curriculum planning. Given a

chance, schoolteachers, who you would expect to use it, don’t (Clark & Peterson,
1986). They will begin planning by thinking about how to organise the content
in the light of the different types and amounts of time available, frequently calling
upon ‘lessons-in-memory’, fragments of those past lessons or tasks that have
worked well at other times. This is quite similar to Stenhouse’s (1975) recom-
mendation that curriculum should be seen as a planned set of worthwhile
activities related to important material within the expectations of a subject
community. Once schoolteachers have drawn on their experiences to organise
content and match it to good learning activities, then they will consider the
learning outcomes they could claim that their plan supports. That consideration
might lead them to tune their plan to accommodate outcomes that had been
missed. Here, outcomes are not habitually used for planning, but as checks that
the plans are as good as they seem. Unless we adopt a deŽ cit view of teachers and
say that this approach, used more by experts than novices, conŽ rms that they are
an inadequate bunch, then it seems that RCP is not as useful as its proponents
claim. Notice that schoolteachers, unlike higher education faculty, have at least
three years of professional training behind them.
3. Rational curriculum planning is too efŽ cient. It aims to map an elegant pathway
from goals, to objectives, delivery, reception and so on. Two forms of the same
objection to this are Ž rst, that creativity, innovation and  exibility depend on
there being slack, spaces or spare capacity in a system; secondly, a part of
complex learning is the undermind’s unhurriable slow learning (Claxton, 1998).

A subtle version of this has been noticed by Brown & Duguid (2000) who
consider the degree to which on-line learning is equivalent to traditional approaches.
It may be that the two are equivalent in terms of certain learning outcomes, which
are typically the outcomes that get graded and lead to degree awards. They are not
likely to be equivalent in terms of the complex learning that would be reckoned to
be an important part of undergraduate education but which is not usually central in
grading processes. Face-to-face environments replete with networks and multiple
groupings sustain very different learning from some on-line environments, even
though each may help students to produce that which grading systems value. So,
curriculum planning for complex learning needs to be concerned with the spaces,
interactions, experiences, opportunities and settings in which formal learning takes
place. RCP isn’t. We can provide environments congenial to developments in
self-management or interpersonal skills, for example, but cannot map out their
developmental trajectories as if we were considering the concept of place value in
mathematics.

Creating Coherent Curricula: the community at the centre

How can coherence and progression be reconciled with the view that complex
learning is desirable, indeterminate and non-linear?
Clues come from Fullan (1999) an educationist in uenced by complexity
 Complexity and Curriculum 375

Students’ teaching encounters across a programme and in any one year of it should …
c Alert them to the ‘rules of the game’— make them aware of what is valued and how it may
be produced, both in general and in each case.
c Use the requisite variety of media (face-to-face, audio-visual, on-line conferencing,
asynchronous ICT).
c Use the requisite variety of methods (presentations, Action Learning Sets, work experience,
seminars, proctoring, tutorials, computer-assisted instruction, independent study projects).
c Be in a variety of styles (coaching, instructing, facilitating, clarifying).
c Meet the standard indicators of good teaching, namely interest, clarity, enthusiasm.
c Be structured across the programme as a whole so that students get progressively less help
and guidance from teachers as they encounter more complex situations, concepts,
arrangements, etc.
c Be summarised in a programme-wide teaching summary.

Students’ learning activities across a programme and in any one year of it will be largely determined
by their teaching entitlement. In addition:
c There should be opportunities for depth study.
c Curriculum should not be so crowded that ‘surface’ learning is encouraged at the expense
of understanding.
c ICT should be treated as a normal learning tool.
c They should expect to work collaboratively, whether learning tasks require it or not.
c Time for strategic thinking, re ection, planning and portfolio-making should be written into
the programme; students should know that; and they should know that they are expected
to engage with these learning activities involving peers, friends and tutors.
c There should be plentiful feedback that is intended to help future performance (rather than
identify informational lapses), especially by encouraging self-theories that value effort and
mindfulness.
c This should be summarised in a programme-wide learning summary.

FIG. 1. Key teaching and learning encounters associated with complex learning.

theory, and Lewin & Regine (1999) who have applied it to commercial and
non-proŽ t organisations. They reject tight-coupled approaches in which goals are
set, plans are laid to deliver them and implementation is about faithful translation of
plans into practices. Better to concentrate on the processes that might lead to the
sorts of outcomes that are wanted, to provide ingredients from which a meal can be
created, rather than to insist on cooking to a recipe. Applied to curriculum, this
insight suggests that planning starts by imagining how to draw together the pro-
cesses, encounters or engagements that make for good learning. Plainly those
processes will vary somewhat depending on what is to be learned and by whom,
although the differences between younger and older learners, or between subject
areas may be less important that between complex and simple learning.
Assuming that it is relatively easy for subject/area experts to identify topics
worth studying, curriculum planning becomes mainly a matter of orchestrating good
learning processes with each other, the content, the available learning time and other
resources. For example, a doubly complex degree programme should combine the
376 P. T. Knight

external consistency of shared curriculum messages with a student entitlement to

teaching and learning encounters of the sort listed in Fig. 1.
This approach to curriculum could be called a process model because where
RCP is primarily about outcomes and tight-coupling of the means by which they are
supposed to be attained, this model takes learning processes to be the proper
concern of curriculum. Elliott (2000) claims that some PaciŽ c Rim countries are
turning from outcomes thinking to process models of curriculum, and concentrating
on what they want learners and teachers to do, not on pre-specifying what is to be
achieved. Where outcomes approaches have been associated with attempts to make
teachers more accountable, the process model implies high-trust systems and pro-
fessional behaviour. Stenhouse (1975, p. 83) considered that ‘… there can be no
educational development without teacher development’, and argued that curriculum
development should centre on appraising and improving practices. However, simply
planning modules so that good content and good processes come together is not
enough. For complex learning to be likely key messages and learning encounters
need to be planned to suffuse the programme. Similar care has to be taken with the
quality of learning environments and learning communities.
In the outcomes model coherence comes through programme goals that are
decomposed into statements of learning outcomes. These, in turn, are turned into
criteria to describe different levels of end-of-programme achievement, such as a
lower second, pass or Ž rst class degree and into level-related descriptors that specify
model achievements at different stages of the programme. Differentiation, pro-
gression and coherence are all designed into the programme by apparently precise
descriptions of what should be learnt. Even if this approach were as feasible as it is
commonsensical, it still begs questions about what needs to be done to get those
outcomes. The process approach cuts straight to those questions and skips the
logic-chopping of trying to get agreement about how to capture different levels of
complex learning. It starts by asking what good learning, teaching and assessment
encounters in this subject area are and quickly leads to lists such as those in Fig. 1.
Coherence is assured by taking each module, choosing encounters that are
compatible with the material and then looking at the distribution of these encounters
against the set of modules that makes up the programme, or that part of it within a
department or team’s control.[3] Departments in the North-west of England partic-
ipating in the ‘Skills plus’ project to enhance student employability are using this
strategy in ‘low cost, high gain’ approaches to enhancing established programmes
(http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/edres/research/skillsplus/index.htm). Simple audit
forms allow departmental co-ordinators to map learning processes across a pro-
gramme. This stocktaking shows that some encounters are rare, others are too
common and others are clustered in, say, Year 1, but absent from the Ž nal year. It
leads to collective and individual negotiations with tutors to get a better distribution
of a good range of encounters.
Progression is then treated mainly as a matter of the team being clear about the
scaffolding[4] that will be available to beginning students and about how it gets
dismantled as they move through the programme. This avoids many of problems
that come from the RCP assumption that progression consists of moving from one
 Complexity and Curriculum 377

learning outcome statement to the next in the taxonomy. (That assumption is

psychologically and philosophically suspect, and often leads planners into knots and
sophistries.) The process model invites teams to act naturally by planning in terms
of what teachers and students do, by considering how to remove scaffolding, and by
then using whatever means are Ž t for the purposes of judging achievements.
Because the process model denies that outcomes can generally be tightly
deŽ ned, let alone Ž nely differentiated by level, many assumptions about assessment
are challenged. To this may be added some trenchant criticisms of summative
assessment practices. The upshot is a fresh view of assessment systems and an
emphasis on: (i) helping students to develop claims to achievement; (ii) providing
accounts of ‘process standards’ (learning engagements and scaffolding); (iii) seeing
assessment systems as communication systems (Knight, 2000).
This view of coherence as shared engagements with common practices or
processes capitalises on a growing recognition that much learning is not conscious,
but seeps into us through what we do (Eraut, 2000). Learning environments—
comprising discourses, practices, interactions, tasks, incentives, patterns of power
and resources— teach over and above what is carried by explicit curricula, as was
shown 30 years ago by scholars who explored the hidden curricula of schooling. This
returns to the earlier theme about the non-equivalence of non-equivalent
qualiŽ cations, but calls attention speciŽ cally to the quality of communities of
learning:
· when psychologists argue that learning with peers matters (Resnick et al.,
1991);
· when researchers maintain that networking within communities and boundary
spanning between communities are important (Brown & Duguid, 2000);
· when degree programmes aim to develop skill in interpersonal relationships,
team work and networking (see pages 371–372, above),
Then it is fair to say that a good curriculum would plan for learning to take place
through communities of practice in which groupwork and peer evaluation are
normal, interpersonal contact is common and networks of engagement are extensive.
It is undoubtedly possible to devise on-line learning sequences to teach people about
working with others, and it is just as likely that graduates of such environments
could score as highly on some measures of understanding of interpersonal work and
learning as graduates of face-to-face communities. It is unlikely that the two groups
would be equivalent in other ways, which is rather what Pascarella & Ternezini
(1991) and Astin (1997) found in their studies of US students. Part-time students
commuting to large urban universities tended to experience thin communities,
where full-time students at small liberal arts colleges are exposed to more and more
complex interactions associated with more complex learning. Different communities
contain different learning opportunities that affect the reach or complexity of what
their members learn.
Clear messages reinforce rich learning environments and communities. If stu-
dents know what sorts of learning is intended then their achievements tend to be
better (Flavell et al., 1993) and they are more able to make claims to others, such
378 P. T. Knight

as employers, about what they have learned. That would be difŽ cult if they were not
aware of the sorts of learning claims to which their learning practices and environ-
ments were conducive. A process curriculum should name the areas in which
students will be able to make— and defend— claims. It directs attention, but does not
specify exactly what ought to appear as a result of learning processes applied to
worthwhile content in rich learning environments/communities.
Successful complex learning implies that curriculum should carry another set of
messages, largely in the form of feedback to students in assessment conversations
about their achievements and how to improve upon them. Dweck (1999) has
summarised a lot of work on self-theories to argue that success is associated with
persistence in the face of difŽ culties, which in turn ties in with believing that
intelligence is not Ž xed and that effort and strategic thinking (or re ection or
mindfulness) matter. This work means that a further form of curriculum coherence
should be coherence of feedback. Some tutors might wish to continue to correct
content in detail, but all would be bound to give advice on doing better next time
when the content would be different. Behind that advice would be espousal of the
general message that effort and thinking will make a difference, and that people can
choose to think well and work hard or not: learners do not have to be victims of the
myth of Ž xed intelligence.
Good curriculum-making has been characterised as a concern for coherence
manifested through attention to processes, messages, and the quality of communities
and environments. It is offered as an alternative to outcomes-led curriculum plan-
ning.

What’s Different?
What is new about these claims? Surely, this process model is only a set practices
that have been widely endorsed in the literature and by ofŽ cial agencies? Agreed, this
paper has commended practices that are already widely admired. However, the
claim that the best way of planning coherent curricula that support complex learning
goals is to concentrate on programme learning processes— encounters, environments
and messages— is contrary to a preoccupation with module-level planning, on the
one hand, and to the orthodoxy of RCP and outcomes-led planning, on the other.
It establishes an alternative. The model sketched here is direct because it is about
what people do, not, as with outcomes thinking, about abstractions, nor, as with
RCP, about logical accounts of what they ought to do. It is realistic, because the
position that many complex learning outcomes cannot be precisely speciŽ ed and
cannot be reliably, ethically and cheaply assessed frees faculty from the Sisyphean
search for valid, reliable and affordable ways of assessing them. It is accessible
because it is easier to orchestrate key messages, encounters and environments than
it is to write learning outcomes and work back from them to curriculum. It respects
academic freedom since the most it requires is that module tutors enter into
negotiations intended to orchestrate learning processes across a programme. This
means that teachers can be eased of the bureaucratic accountability that has become
associated with outcomes approaches because they are treated as professionals who
 Complexity and Curriculum 379

are trusted to vivify the curriculum. In short, this process model is inspired by
complexity theory, which is more appropriate to thinking about learning in higher
education than any rivals based on Enlightenment rationalism and hubris.
Some say it is dishonest to advance a process approach to curriculum when it
is not just the British government that is mandating outcomes approaches. A cheap
reply would be that it is less honest to act as if detailed pre-speciŽ ed outcomes and
RCP make educational sense and/or are useful. A more temperate response would
be that it makes better sense to plan curriculum in this intuitive way, reassured by
the claim from complexity theory that what matters is getting the ingredients— the
processes, messages and conditions— right and trusting that good outcomes will
follow. A curriculum designed in this way can then be checked against sets of
benchmarks, level descriptors or other learning outcomes to see whether any
outcomes are unlikely to emerge from it and then, if need be, it can be tuned. The
process approach puts the casuistry and hypotheticals of outcomes in their place,
and brings questions about good learning to the fore.

NOTES
[1] Higher education in Britain is repeating many of the mistakes of school-based curriculum
development.
[2] There is nothing wrong with having goals and expressing them as open or fuzzy learning
outcomes. Eisner, for example, talked of ‘expressive outcomes’, which I understand as
‘teaching, learning and assessment encounters’. Trouble comes when precise outcomes are
linked with indeterminate processes; when they are expressed in generic terms as if
achievements were independent of context; when attempts are made to deck them with false
precision; and when it is assumed that anything important can be described by precise,
generic outcomes. Any assumptions that a judgement that someone has met such outcomes
indicates that they will continue to perform at that level regardless of context only
compound the difŽ culties. This paper is only critical of those misconceived learning
outcomes.
[3] Many programmes allow students a high degree of choice so that it is not possible to map
out the encounters that they will have. In those cases curriculum makers could look at de
facto pathways, at the combinations of modules that students regularly construct or are
expected to construct. There will, of course, be students whose module combinations lie
outside these few popular pathways and there is not much that can be done about it. It is
also likely that often the best that can be done is to identify pathways that account for
50–80% of the degree, and that attempts to include more modules in a pathway
speciŽ cation will be at the expense of the number of students who it Ž ts.
[4] Scaffolding is not a precise term. It includes the degree of task structure (highly-structured
tasks are easier because learners are told what to do); whether resources are at hand and
easily manageable (it is one thing to write a paper around four articles in the course reader
and another to be told that, ‘There’s plenty on this in the library, especially in the journals’);
framing (whether it is clear what counts as relevant information for the task in hand);
familiarity (clones of tasks done in class are easiest); and social resources (people can often
do things together that they are not yet ready to do alone and tutorial advice resolves many
difŽ culties). Two graduates might both produce essays of similar range and sophistication
but the papers might represent very different achievements if one student had a lot of
scaffolding and the other little. Arguably, the grade in ation of the last thirty years has more
to do with changes in social practices manifested in the scaffolding available to undergrad-
uates than to a decline in the standards used to rate learning products.
380 P. T. Knight

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