The child's construction of the curriculum

Abstract

The curriculum both as a whole and in its parts can be understood as a social representation. Teachers' social representations of the curriculum, instantiated in classroom practice and discourse, provide the resources from which children internalize the curriculum. Children re-construct the curriculum as an active process that depends both on the development of their own socio-cognitive resources and on the structuration provided in specific classrooms.
The paper investigates how children in classrooms with different types of structuration represent the curriculum and how these change over time. Comparable case studies were carried out in schools chosen to reflect three types of curriculum organization. Twelve classrooms took part in the study including two parallel classrooms in each school and at each of two year groups. Ethnographic investigations were employed to compile a typology classroom practices used to map the range and type of curriculum structuration in each classroom. Children's representations of the curriculum were investigated through a sorting task. Analysis focused on both children's performance and their talk about the task.
Findings demonstrate significant differences in the classificatory systems used by children according to year group and type of curriculum. Conclusions suggest: that as children gain experience of schooling they construct more elaborate social representations of the curriculum regardless of curriculum type; that between the two year groups categories undergo qualitative transformations and that curriculum structuration becomes more a feature of the way the older children re-construct the curriculum, specifically the collection type curriculum which facilitated the re-construction of a markedly different curriculum in comparison to the other types.