Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction

reviewed by James C. Jupp - February 07, 2014

Ralph Tylers Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (BPoCI) represented the perfect ideological tonic for culminating the historical epoch of curriculum theorizing between 1892 and 1958. Emphasizing the professional bureaucratization of its epoch, Tylers BPoCI and the Tyler rationale provided (and continue to provide) the hegemonic logic in curriculum design and development that you can simply not not want in the historical present.

During an epoch of professional bureaucratization, Tylers BPoCI put the capstone on one epoch of curriculum inquiry (Goodlad in Kliebard, 1971, p. 272). Emphasizing this epoch, the professional bureaucratization of curriculum theorizing accompanied the rise of graded public schools. Important in this discussion is the recognition that graded public schools, as they exist today, did not exist in the same form in 1900. For example, in 1900 only ten percent of school-aged children even attended secondary schools let alone graduated with diplomas, and as late as 1940, fewer than thirty percent of white children and fewer than ten percent of children of color finished high school (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1993). In this epoch of professional-bureaucratic transformation, the political battles over the organization of public schools and school curriculum represented an endless multitude of minute municipal, county, and state level skirmishes among conflicting interests and stakeholders along with state and local political machinery. Only in the context of state and local political machinery of the late 1800s and early 1900sincluding corruption, nepotism, graft, and fraud (Duffy & Price, 2009; Tyack, 1974)could rationalistic professional-bureaucratic titles like curriculum specialist even become comprehensible needs. Despite the accuracy of revisionist historians critiques of this epoch (Callahan, 1962, Kliebard, 1971; Spring, 2000; Tyack 1974), it behooves us to recall one aspect of the professional-bureaucratic transformation felicitously taken-for-granted in revisionists critiques: the epoch of professional bureaucratization represented a bold experiment in public investment.

This historical epoch of the professional-bureaucratic transformation provided the broad backdrop for the rise of curriculum specialists. Importantly in this epoch, professional-bureaucratic specialists became characteristic not only in education but also across a number of ascendant university-based human sciences and professions. Concurrent with this historical epoch, professional bureaucratization eventually institutionalized the Franklin Delano Roosevelt hegemony, and this power elite endured through Lyndon Baines Johnsons Great Society programs that came replete with an army of human scientists there to help. Characteristic of this historical epoch, the predominant assumptions in human sciences like curriculum theorizing emphasized the human scientist as managing, administrating, and even fixing social problems using positivist scientific methods (Winterer, 2002). Though BPoCI drew on eclectic-pragmatic rather than positivist paradigms, Tylers various roles in The Eight Year Study, in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing program, and as Educational Advisor to several U.S. Presidents, earned him the informal moniker Mr. Fix it (Kridel, 2010, p. 904), a handle very much referencing the assumptions for human scientists of his epoch. Given Tyler and the Tyler rationales ascendance during this period, it should come as no surprise that the curriculum theorizing in Tylers BPoCI  is not a teachers statement of curriculum development; it is a bureaucrats (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995, p. 149). Nonetheless, by the middle 1950s, a burgeoning, complex, insurgent, and multivariegated intellectual inconformity and rejection of professional bureaucratization had emerged on the margins of the human sciences (e.g., Jourard, 1958, 1964; Wright Mills, 1956, 1959). In curriculum theorizing, the ill-fated progressive Life Adjustment Movement (e.g., Prosser, Hawkins, & Wright, 1951) had painted a target on progressive curriculum theorizing that drew fire from paideia traditionalists (e.g., Bestor, 1953/1985; Rickover, 1960) and nonconformist progressives (e.g., Huebner, 1959/1991) alike. By the National Defense Education Act of 1958 brought on by Sputnik in 1957, the aspirations of professional bureaucratic curriculum theorizing were sidelined by the cognitive revolution. Despite the revolution in curriculum leadership, school bureaucracies continued through this day, and the Tyler rationale has endured, perhaps, as a zombie paradigm that just keeps coming back.

Within this epoch of professional-bureaucratization, Tylers BPoCI provided the perfect ideological tonicdefensible on all fronts. Tylers BPoCI and the Tyler rationale directly and eclectically drew on preceding curriculum theorizing and his experience in curriculum development and educational evaluation. Regarding his (by-and-large uncited) sources, Tylers BPoCI included understandings of (a) educational objectives from behaviorist (e.g., Thorndike, 1910) curriculum theorists (e.g., Bobbitt, 1918); (b) active and experiential understandings of teaching and learning (e.g., Dewey, 1916, 1938/1997; Kilpatrick, 1918); (c) child-centered curriculum theorizing (e.g., Rugg & Shumaker, 1928), (d) analyses of social needs (Charters, 1923; Snedden, 1921); and, (e) curriculum-making as an inherently value-laden activity (Counts, 1932/1978) to enumerate just a few sources included and largely left uncited. Besides drawing on preceding curriculum theorizing, Tyler also drew on his experience with large curriculum development projects including the Eight Year Study mentioned above.

The Tyler rationale established itself as an on-going fixture in curriculum design and development not only for local school projects but at all levels: local, state, national, and international. Briefly, the Tyler rationale laid out four curriculum design and development questions for curriculum specialists:

1.

What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?

2.

How can learning experiences be selected which are likely to be useful in attaining these objectives?

3.

How can learning experiences be organized for effective instruction?

4.

How can the effectiveness of learning experiences be evaluated?

Following Deweys (1916, 1938/1997) notions of educational freedom, Tyler left educational purposes, values, and problem solving to local educators, modestly stating that every teacher needed to participate at least to the extent of gaining an adequate understanding of the ends and means (p. 126). For the first time in curriculum theorizing, the Tyler rationale laid out a structure that directly linked established purposes stated in the form of objectives to educational evaluations or assessments (Jackson, 1992). In linking objectives to assessments, Tylers BPoCI synthesized all of the curriculum theorizing outlined above including conversations with immediate colleagues in which Tyler, H.H. Giles, and Hilda Taba discussed curriculum development and the rationales legendary questions (Kridel, 2010, p. 907). Tylers BPoCI, adapting sources yet stingy in sharing credit to antedating curriculum theorists or immediate colleagues, recently led William Pinar (2013) to present evidence that the Tyler rationale was plagiarized, especially in reference to Hilda Tabas contributions.

Plagiarized or just synthesized and stingy with the credit, Tylers BPoCI modestly presented itself as one way of viewing an instructional program as a functioning instrument of education (p. 1). Despite Tylers intentions or modest tone, Tylers BPoCI proved itself to be extremely sticky, ascendant, and proliferative since its appearance. Philip Jackson (1992), documenting curriculum theorizing through 1990, called it the Bible of curriculum making (p. 24). William Schubert (1986), critiquing Tylers BPoCI as the dominant curriculum paradigm (p. 171), understood Tylers four questions as perennial analytic categories (p. 188) only thirty seven years after the rationale was coherently arranged (Jackson, 1992). Serious critiques of Tylers BPoCI, following directions staked out in previous 1950s intellectual inconformity, clamored for recognition in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Not the least of these critiques, Joseph Schwab (1969) declared curriculum theorizing moribund (p. 493) due to its over-emphasis on theoretical constructs in educational psychology, or conversely, empirical objectives and measurements proposed by Tylers followers, and Herbert Kliebard (1970) excoriated Tylers BPoCI by linking its rationale to the dehumanizing production model (p. 269) from behaviorist scientific management of the 1920s. Despite these critiques and many others too numerous to review here, Tylers BPoCI and the Tyler rationale have provided the hegemonic logic in curriculum development and design inciting Eliot Eisner (1985) to ironically lament Once learned, Tylers four questions are hard to forget (p. 12).

Indeed, the Tyler rationale, perhaps reflecting a decontextualized and ahistorical misinterpretation (Henderson & Gornik, 2007; Kridel, 2010; Schubert, 1986;), has since provided the administrative structures for the accountability movement of the last thirty years. Important reports or laws that inherently advanced the Tyler rationale included, as examples, Equality of Educational Opportunity (Coleman et al., 1966); A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education [NCEE], 1984/1994); Goals 2000 (documented in U.S. Department of Education, 1998), and others. For a recent example, the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA (Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development, 2012) works through a decontextualized implementation of the structures first present in Tylers BPoCI. Adding to this administrative interpretation of Tyler are a plethora of widely adopted curriculum development and design textbooks that name Tyler as foundational figure (e.g. Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) or assume the Tyler rationale (e.g., Cruichshank, Bainer-Jenkins, & Metcalf, 2012) as basis. Nonetheless, in adhering to (or remaining silent about) standardized notions of accountability, this brand of curriculum theorizing felicitously removes teachers and others from meaningfully participating in the development and design of educational purposes or evaluations, specifically, questions one and four of the Tyler rationale.

Tylers BPoCI, originally announcing itself as the basis for contextualized pragmatic curriculum making in local settings, paradoxically provided the hegemonic logic for curriculum development and design. Significantly, in achieving its ascendance, Tylers BPoCI has provided an ahistorical and decontextualized rationale. Rather than emphasizing pragmatic curriculum making in local contexts, the Tyler rationale instead broke loose from any contexts or even reference to itself as part of an audit culture ascendant since 1980. In the present, decontextualized and ahistorical implementations of the Tyler rationale serve as bases for abstractly ranking national achievement outcomes in international reports, declaring some nations school systems top notch and others broken failures despite the fact that school systems were conceived with totally distinct historical purposes and structures. Ironically, in the present-day era of postmodern flux, accelerating change, and rapidly advancing (unjust) globalization, standardized accountability-based reforms seek only to ratchet up notions of uniform behaviorist-influenced objectives and high stakes assessments from a previous epoch. Contradictorily, standardized accountability-based reforms seek uniformity precisely at a time when uniform structures in business and entrepreneurial sectors are immediately dismissed as outdated, counter-productive, and against human creativity. Commenting on uniformity and standards-based reforms of his day, Charles Elliot, eighty-nine years old as ex-President of Harvard University, came out of retirement in 1923 to denounce the blight of standardization (in Kliebard, 1971, p.  83) that he thought killed teachers and students creativity and interest in study. Ninety years later and after thirty years of ratcheting up uniform standards and high stakes assessments, it is clear that professional-bureaucratic modes of curriculum theorizing are unlikely to provide the results they promised thirty years ago (NCEE, 1984/1994). Quite to the contrary, it is increasingly obvious that ahistorical and decontextualized adaptations of Tylers BPoCI and the Tyler rationale represent part of the highly administrated and variously termed problem, crisis, failure, or dysfunction in public schools.

What directions, then, are possible for a renaissance in curriculum theory and development (Wraga & Hlebowitsh, 2003, p. 425)? That is too broad of a question for this review or even a single article. Nonetheless, a few leads might be provided for triangulating ourselves out of an administrated crisis tied to outdated professional-bureaucratic structures from a previous era. Drawing on historical and reconceptualized curriculum theorizing, the leads that follow are addressed to curriculum theorists, teacher educators, and policy makers. Here are the leads

1.

Understand that teaching and learning represent personal, social, autobiographical identity-projects (Dewey, 1916, 1938/1997; Henderson 2014; Miller, 1992; Pinar, 2012; Schubert & Ayers, 1992;) and that becoming committed teachers (Jupp, 2013) or engaged students (Ladson-Billings, 2009) requires contextually-based personal and social relevance. Dynamic reconceptualized teaching and learning (Henderson, 2014) requires philosophically-and-theoretically informed notions of teachers professional identity and curriculum specialists professionalism (e.g., Tyler, 1949/2013; Shulman, 1987). Reconceptualized teaching and learning begins with understanding that teacher education and curriculum theorizing represent authentic intellectual-practical pursuits not merely technical know-how to get results. For recent vibrant examples of reconceptualized teacher education, see Asher (2007), Helfenbein (2008), Milam et al. (2014), Moule & Higgins (2007), Wang (2013), and other theory-practice, though a broad tradition of reconceptualized teacher education as intellectual work exists (documented in Kridel, 1999).

2.

Recall the modesty of Tylers and the historical fields (outlined in Wraga & Hlebowitsh, 2003) emphasis on contexts, engaging teachers, and local problem solving that capacitates educators to determine purposes and develop evaluative assessments (Henderson & Gornik, 2007; Henderson, 2014; Schubert, 1986). The historical record since the 1980s demonstrated that top-down ahistorical and decontextualized legislative reform movements fail to engage teachers and provide narrow non-dynamic curriculum spaces (Cary, 2006). Overly-linear assumptions in the administrative interpretation of Tylers BPoCI need to be replaced by curriculum development and design that recognizes postmodern complexity (Doll, 1993; Slattery, 2006) and associated multivariegated programs with differing purposes and evaluations (Eisner, 1997; Foshay, 2000; Noddings, 1994; Pinar, 2004). Teachers and students need to inhabit and leverage curriculum to activate its potentials not just be administrated by (well-funded) think tanks with administrative prosthetics seeking to reach into local classrooms.

3.

Based on broad understandings of postmodern complexity and multivariegated programs, new organizational forms and related funding structures need to emerge that replace comprehensive schools, especially James Conants one-stop shopping comprehensive bureaucracies. Specifically not parasitic academies or charters that currently bleed comprehensive public schools of top students and funding, the next round of curriculum development and design will incur broad changes in organizational structures and a re-commitment to public investment that echo directions in the small schools project in Chicago (Klonsky & Klonsky, 2008) but also insist on new brick-and-mortar material relations not just re-tooling old bureaucracies from a previous epoch.

These leadsbeginning to suggest a transformation as sweeping and significant as those of the bureaucratic-professional epochwill require new commitments to meliorist and social reconstructionist understandings of what is understood as public school. Hopefully, the courage that existed during the professional-bureaucratic epoch still exists to embark on new bold experiments in public investment and organizational structures. The required sweeping changes for a renaissance in curriculum development and design would be nothing if not an experimental transformation with no guarantees.

References

Asher, N. (2007). Made in the (multicultural) U.S.A: Unpacking the tensions of race, culture, gender, and sexuality in education. Educational Researcher, 36(2), 6573.

Bestor, A. (1985). Educational wastelands: The retreat from learning in our public schools. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. (Original work published 1953)

Bobbitt, J. F. (1918). The curriculum. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Callahan, R. (1962). Education and the cult of efficiency. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Cary, L. J. (2006). Curriculum spaces: Discourse, postmodern theory, and educational research. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Charters, W. (1923). Curriculum construction. New York, NY: Macmillan

Counts, G. S. (1978). Dare the school build a new social order? Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. (Work originally published 1932)

Coleman, J. S., Campbell, E. Q., Hobson, C. J., McPartland, J., Mood, J. M., Weinfeld, F. D., & York, R. L. (1966). Equality of educational opportunity. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Cruickshank, D. R., Bainer Jenkins, D., & Metcalf, K. K. (2012). The act of teaching (6^th ed.) New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education. New York, NY: Free Press.

Dewey, J. (1997). Education and experience. New York, NY: Touchstone. (Original work published 1938)

Doll, W. (1993). A postmodern perspective on curriculum. New York, N.Y.: Teachers College Press.

Duffy, J. W. & Price, T.A. (October 1517, 2009). Complicated conversations concerning commercial club curriculum. Curriculum in Motion: A Moment of Celebration, Critique and Contemplation" 30th Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice. http://conference.jctonline.org/index.php/cctcp/2009/paper/view/376

Eisner, E. (1997). Cognition and representation: A way to pursue the American Dream? Phi Delta Kappan 78(5), 349-353.

Eisner, E. (1985). The educational imagination (2^nd ed). New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company.

Foshay, A. (2000). The curriculum: Purpose, substance, and practice. New York, N.Y.: Teachers College Press.

Helfenbein, R. (2008). Unsettling beliefs: A cultural studies approach to teacher education. In J. Diem & R. Helfenbeins Unsettling beliefs: Teaching theory to teachers (pp. 1-14). Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age Publishing, Inc.

Henderson J. & Gornik, R. (2007). Transformative curriculum leadership (3^rd ed.). Columbus, OH: Pearson.

Henderson, J. (2014). Educators professional freedom for students democratic liberation. In D.A. Breault & R. Breault. Experiencing Dewey (2^nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Huebner, D. W. (1991). The capacity for wonder in education. In V. Hillis W. Pinar The lure of the transcendent: Collected essays of Dwayne E. Huebner (pp. 1-10). Lawrence Erlbaum & Associates: Mahwah, NJ. (Work originally published in 1959)

Jackson, P. (1992). Conceptions of curriculum and curriculum specialists. In P. Jackson (Ed.) Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 3-40). New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company.

 

Jourard, S. M. (1958). A study of self-disclosure. Scientific American, 198(5), 77-82.

Jourard, S. M. (1964). The Transparent Self. Self-disclosure and well-being. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Jupp, J. (2013). Becoming teachers of inner-city students: Life histories and teacher stories of committed White teachers. Boston, MA: Sense Publishers.

Kilpatrick, W.H. (1918). The project method. Teachers College Record 19(4), 319-335.

Kliebard, H. M. (1971). Bureaucracy in curriculum theory. In V. Haubrich (Ed.) ASCD Yearbook: Freedom, bureaucracy, and schooling (pp. 74-93). Washington, D.C.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Kliebard, H. M. (1970). Reappraisal: The Tyler rationale. School Review (February), 259-272.

Klonsky, M., & Klonsky, S. (2008). Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society. New York, N.Y.: Routledge.

Kridel, C. (1999). The Bergamo conferences, 1973-1997: Reconceptualization and the curriculum theory conferences. In W.F. Pinar (Ed.) Contemporary curriculum discourses: Twenty years of JCT (pp. 509-526). New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Kridel, C.  (2010). Tyler, R. W & Tyler Rationale, The. In The encyclopedia of curriculum studies (Vol. 2 pp. 904-908). London: Sage.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2009). The Dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African American children. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Milam, J.L., Jupp, J.C., Hoyt, M.W., Kaufman, M., Grumbein, M., OMalley, M.P., Carpenter, B.S., and Slattery, P. (2014). Autobiography, Disclosure, and Engaged Pedagogy: Toward a Practical Discussion on Teaching Foundations in Teacher Education Programs. Teacher Education and Practice 1, TBA.

Miller, J. (1990). Creating spaces and finding voices: Teachers collaborating for empowerment. Albany, NY: SUNY.

Moule, J., & Higgins, K.M. (2007). The role of African American mentor teachers in preparing white preservice teachers for African American student populations. The Journal of Negro Education 76(4), 609-622.

National Center for Educational Statistics. (1993). One hundred and twenty years of American education: A statistical portrait. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1994). A nation at-risk: The full account. Portland, OR: USA Research, Inc.

Noddings, N. (1994). Does everyone count? Reflections on reforms in school mathematics. Journal of Mathematical Behavior 13, 89-104.

Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. (2012). P.I.S.A 2012 Results. (Retrieved January 2014). http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012-results.htm

Pinar, W. F. (2013). Plagiarism and the Tyler Rationale. Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Curriculum Studies 9(2), 1-13.

Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Pinar, W. F. (2012). What is curriculum theory? (2nd ed). New York, NY: Routledge.

Pinar, W. F.; Reynolds, W.; Slattery, P., & Taubman, P. (1995). Understanding curriculum. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang.

Prosser, C. A., Hawkins, L. S., & Wright, J. C. (1951). Development of vocational education. Chicago, IL: American Technological Society.

Rickover, H. G. (1960). Education and freedom. New York, NY: Dutton.

Rugg, H., & Schumaker, A. (1928). Chapter 5 New articles of faith. In The child-centered school: An appraisal of the new education (pp. 54-67). New York, NY: World Books.

Schubert, W. (1986). Curriculum: Paradigm, perspective, and possibility. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing Company.

Schubert, W., & Ayers, B. (Eds.) (1992). Teacher Lore: Learning from our own Experience. Troy, NY: Educators International Press, Inc.

Schwab, J. (1969). The practical: A language for curriculum. School Review 78, 1-23.

Shulman, L. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review 57(1), 1-22.

Slattery, P. (2006). Curriculum development in the Postmodern Era (2^nd ed.). New York, N.Y.: Routledge.

Snedden, D. (1921). Sociological determination of objectives in education. Philadelphia, PA: J.B. Lippencott .

Spring, J. (2000). The American school: 1642-2000 (5^th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Thorndike, E. (1910). The contribution of psychology to education. The Journal of Educational Psychology 1, 5-12.

Tyack, D. B. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tyler, R. (2013). Basic principles of curriculum and instruction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1949)

U.S. Department of Education. (1998). Archived Information Goals 2000: Reforming education to improve student achievement.  (Retrieved January 2014) www2.ed.gov/PDFDocs/g2kfinal.pdf‎  

Wang, H. (2013). A nonviolent approach to social justice education. Educational Studies 49, 485-503.

Winterer, C. (2002). The culture of classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American intellectual life 1780-1910. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (2^nd ed). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson.

Wraga, W., & Hlebowitsh, P. S. (2003). Toward a renaissance in curriculum theory and development in the U.S.A. Journal of Curriculum Studies 35(4), 425-437.

Wright Mills, C. (1956). The power elite. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Wright Mills, C. (1959). The sociological imagination. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record, Date Published: February 07, 2014 https://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 17409, Date Accessed: 11/29/2021 10:11:54 PM Purchase Reprint Rights for this article or review