Teaching in the Field of Higher Education: Curriculum and/or Instruction Courses

35 TEACHING IN THE FIELD OF HIGHER EDUCATION: CURRICULUM AND/OR INSTRUCTION COURSES David D. Dill Assistant Professor of Education University of North Carolina— Chapel Hill Courses in curriculum and/or instruction address core questions of per­ ennial importance to institutions of higher education. These issues in­ clude: 1) What knowledge is most worth learning and how has the answer to this question evolved over time and in different areas? 2) Once defined, how should this knowledge be structured into a formal curriculum? and 3) Once structured, what techniques or methods should be utilized to ensure that it is learned? Perhaps it is because these issues have always been with us and have created a rich tradition in the literature of higher education that the course materials submitted for this column clustered readily in terms of topics, literature, and points of view. While almost every syllabus addressed each of the above questions, the major variation in content among the courses was the amount of weight given to each issue. Courses of a descriptive and philosophical orientation are balanced by courses of a more applied character. For example, courses placing major emphasis on the philosophical rationale or intellectual history of higher education curricula and the analysis of current trends in curricu­ lar development tend to include subtopics such as: 1 ) the history and evo­ lution of "classical" undergraduate curricula, e .g . , liberal arts and the general education movement; 2 ) the more recent "developmental" curricula; and 5) curricula for adult education. Resources for these topics include Bell (1968); Carnegie Foundation (1977); Dressel (1971); Levine and Weingart (1974); Menges (1977); and Rudolph (1977). Contemporary trends in curricula are pursued by the study of specific institutional examples and the litera­ ture discussing the "state of the art" in various fields, e.g . , the Change Magazine, "Reports on Teaching," and Kaysen (1973). A second orientation is represented by those courses which place greater emphasis on the design and evaluation of sets of learning experiences. Major subtopics in these courses include the structure of knowledge, student needs and the "hidden curriculum,” the development of curricular objectives, various models of curricular evaluation, and tactics of curricular change ap­ propriate to higher education institutions. Resources characteristic of this approach are Bloom (1956), Mayhew and Ford (1972), and Tyler (1950). The subtopic of change tends to reference the same basic issues and literature taught in courses on the management of change, Dill (1978). A third orientation is represented by courses addressing the development of professional competence in teaching. These courses emphasize skill devel­ opment in the design and revision of a unit of instruction, and include top­ ics such as the application of systems analysis, the development of objec­ tives, techniques of testing and evaluation, individualized and/or learnerbased instruction, and instructional methods. Typical resources are Banathy (1968), Cross (1976), Davis (1976), and Milton and Edgerly (1977). Courses representing each of these orientations will now be discussed. Because these courses also tended to vary in their teaching design, special attention will be given to the means of instruction. Philosophical Orientation Kellams (Virginia) has designed a course which attempts to provide stu­ dents with analytic tools for analyzing curricular arrangements and under­ standing contemporary curricular trends. A basis for analysis is provided by an historical review of the general education movement and by examining com­ peting philosophies or models: traditional, neo-traditional, technocratic, progressive and radical. 36 Important sub-topics include: personalizing and participation, under­ graduate education in the disciplines, interdisciplinary and multidiscipli­ nary courses and programs, means of individualizing the curriculum (e .g . , broadening of options, time reforms, PSI, contract learning, competency-based learning, experimental colleges), non-traditional learning (e .g . , external degree, cooperative education, experiential learning), education for the pro­ fessions and curriculum change. An important element of the course is a paper project on innovations in the disciplines, in which students study trends in the curriculum— structure and content— and corresponding instruc­ tional methods. Students select one of the fifteen disciplines traditionally housed in colleges of arts and sciences or in college parallel programs in the two-year institutions. Using sources such as the Change "Reports on Teaching," disciplinary journals, course syllabi, and interviews, students analyze the...