Appendix Section 2: Core Courses in Curriculum & Instruction

Part 1

Section A: EDCI 803 Curriculum Development

This course provides an overview on the multiple facets of school curriculum, patterns
of organization in curriculum, and specific help in developing school curriculum. This course
introduced multiple philosophies on the development of curriculum like progressivism,
essentialism, prennialism, and reconstructionism, and educators in this course reflected on
what type of curriculum philosophies they most closely aligned to in their own practices. This
course also had students discussing how curriculum should be used in the classroom and school
overall, which was culminated with an interview with a curriculum leader in their own school
district.
During this course, I learned the differences between null curriculum, hidden
curriculum, and explicit curriculum, and it opened my eyes to how those types of curriculum
have been present in my own classroom and school environment. The concept of null
curriculum specifically stood out to me because I am a social studies teacher, and a lot of the
null curriculums fall under the umbrella of the social sciences. The social sciences include at
least 10 different content areas, yet schools usually only focus on 3 or 4 of those content areas.
Who gets to choose what is explicit and null curriculum for Social Studies? How was it
chosen/became the standard model? Those are just two of many questions that I discussed
throughout this course. As I answered those questions, I reflected on my own teaching
practices and the curriculum I taught (even though I am a social studies teacher, I only explicitly
teach history and geography, and the schools Ive worked in only include history, geography,
government, and economics courses explicitly). That mean that the other content areas in the
social sciences were part of the null curriculum and were not being explicitly taught in schools.
Since I completed this course, I have made it a point to include more of the social studies
content areas (the null curriculums) into my explicit curriculums, and I have worked with other
educators in the department to create courses that are based on those often-excluded social
studies content areas.