Republic of the Philippines

LAGUNA STATE POLYTECHNIC UNIVERSITY

Province of Laguna

Graduate Studies and Applied Research

Curriculum Development and Recent Trends

Course Code: Congate 209

Course Description: Curriculum Development
Facilitator: Ma. Elaiza G. Mayo
Professor: Agripina F. Banayo, Ed. D.
Contact Number: 0977-625-8819
Email Address: elaizamayo@gmail.com

Topic:
Learner-Centered Designs
1. Child-Centered Design
2. Experience-Centered Design
3. Romantic (Radical) Design

Intended Learning Outcomes:

1. Identify what are the Learner-Centered Designs
2. Differentiate Child-Centered Design, Experience-Centered
Design, and Romantic (Radical Design)
3. Apply the knowledge in Learner-Centered designs to our
teaching profession.

RATIONALE

The scope of this topic is to discuss: what are the learner-centered

designs, who are the proponents of the Child-Centered, Experience-
Centered, and Romantic (Radical Design). This focuses on how the
educators in the early 1990s develop a curriculum emphasizing the
development of learners and how it help us modern teachers in
creating a good curriculum.

Learner-Centered Designs

All curricular leaders desire is to develop curricula significant to

students.
With this, educators in the 1990s stated that students are the
programs emphasis.
These designs are realized more often in the elementary level than in
secondary.
In elementary: Teachers manage to highlight the whole child.
In secondary: The stress is more on the subject-centered designs.

1. Child-Centered Design
The proponent of this design believe that students must be
enthusiastic in their learning environments and that learning
should not be detached from students lives which is mostly on
the paradigm of the subject-centered designs.
As an alternative, the design should be centered on students
lives, needs and interests.
Every child is a unique and special individual. Consequently, we
have to teach individual children and be respectful of and
account for their individual uniqueness of age, gender, culture,
temperament, and learning style.
Children are active participants in their own education and
development. This means that they should be mentally involved
and physically active in learning what they need to know and do.
Childrens ideas, preferences, learning styles, and interests are
considered in the planning for and implementation of
instructional practices.

Arthur Ellis
-said that attending to students needs and interests requires careful
observation of students and faith that they can articulate to those
needs and interests. Also, young students interests must have
educational value.

According to the book of Ornstein and Hunkins (2009):

People with this view consider knowledge as an outgrowth of

personal experience
People use knowledge to advance their goals and construct it
from their interactions with their world.
Learners actively construct their own understandings.
Learning is not the passive reception of information from an
authority
Students must have classroom opportunities to explore first-
hand physical, social, emotional, and logical knowledge.

John Locke
-noted that individuals construct bodies of knowledge from a foundation
of simple ideas derived from their experiences.
Immanuel Khant
-was a German philosopher during the Enlightenment era of the late
18th century. His best known work is the Critique of Pure Reason.
-postulated that aspects of our knowledge result from our cognitive
actions; we construct our universe to have certain properties.

Jean Jacques Rousseau

-was a French philosopher during the Enlightenment era. One of his
contribution in Education was the Naturalism
-children should be taught within the context of their natural
environment, not in an artificial one like a classroom. Teaching must
suit a childs developmental level.

Henrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel

-claimed that children would achieve self- realization through social
participation, which they expressed as the principle of learning by
doing.

Henrich Pestalozzi was a Swiss philosopher who contributed about

the philosophy and instructional method that encouraged harmonious
intellectual, moral, and physical development; methodology of empirical
sensory learning, especially through object lessons; and his use of
activities, excursions, and nature studies that anticipated Progressive
education

Friedrich Froebel was the idealist of Kindergarten where children

could play with others of their own age group and experience their first
gentle taste of independence.

Francis Parker
-he disputed that effective education did not call for strict discipline.
Instead, attaining the childs innate tendency to become involved in
exciting things is in the institutional approach that is somewhat free.

Child-Centered Design (curriculum) was structured around human

impulses:
the impulse to socialize, construct, inquire, question, experiment,
and express or create artistically. (Ornstein and Hunkins,2009)

2. Experience-Centered Designs

Closely look like child-centered design but the difference is that

childrens needs and interests cannot be planned for all children.
The curriculum cannot be pre-designed, whole thing must be
prepared on the spot as the teacher responds to each child.
 Teachers role is to build an inspiring learning environment in
which students can explore, come into direct contact with
knowledge, and observe others learning and actions.
The social activity for this design is the childs learning.

John Dewey
-childrens impulsive power, their demand for self expression, cannot
be suppressed.
-interest was purposeful
-In Experience and Education, education should commence with the
experience learners already possessed when they entered school.
-Experience was essentially the starting point for all learning.
-Children exist in a personal world of experiences and their interests
are personal concerns, rather than bodies of knowledge and their
attendant facts concepts, generalization, and theories.

Dewey never supported building childrens interests in the curriculum

placing children in the role of the curriculum makers.

The easy thing is to seize upon something in the nature of the

child, upon something in the developed consciousness of the
adult, and insist upon that as a key to the whole problem.

-educators must analyse childrens experiences and see how these

experiences formed childrens knowledge.

>Staring point: areas where the childs natural interests could be

connected to formalized knowledge.

-Dewey required educators to think of the childs experiences as fluid

and dynamic, hence the curriculum would frequently change to focus
on students needs.

-Endorsers of experience-centered curriculum design have confidence

in each students uniqueness and skill.

-Educators role is to give opportunities, not to command certain

actions.

Thomas Armstrong
-creating a friendly classroom environment, one that radiates a joyful
atmosphere and capitalizes on students natural character to learn.
3. Romantic (Radical) Design
Students must learn ways of engaging in a critique of knowledge
Learning is reflective, it is not externally imposed by someone in
power
Radicals view society as deeply flawed & believe that schools
used curriculum to control & indoctrinate, not to educate &
emancipate
Students must accept responsibility for educating themselves &
demand freedom

Paolo Freire
-is the most inuential thinker of education in the late twentieth century,
particularly with informal educators with his emphasis on dialogue, his
concern for the oppressed and educational pro-grams for adult
education and literacy
-believes that education should inform the masses about their
oppression, provoke them to feel dissatisfied with their condition, and
give them skills necessary for correcting identified injustices.

Curricula leaders who support radical views consider that

individuals must learn ways of involvement in analysis of
knowledge.
Learning is reflective; it is not externally inflicted by someone in
power.

Ornstein and Hunkins (in their book of Curriculum, Foundations,

Principles and Issues)
-The biggest difference between mainstream educators and radicals is
that radicals view society as deeply flawed and believe that education
indoctrinates students to serve controlling groups.

References
Excerpt from Early Childhood Education Today, by G.S. Morrison,
2009 edition, p. 109. 2009
Ornstein and Hunkins (Curriculum, Foundations, Principles and
Issues), 2009
Emerita Reyes, Ed.D., Curriculum Develop p. 99-102
https://www.education.com/reference/article/child-centered-education/
www.google.com