JOURNAL OF ENGAGEMENT IN CURRICULUM COMMUNITIES:
SSelection of a Professional Curriculum
Community:
CDAG (Curriculum Developers Affinity Group)
is my chosen curriculum community.
Evidence of the connection cannot be provided
at this time (see Issued Experienced), however, information about CDAG can
still be found at:
2.
Issues Experienced
Given that there is a current strike of
Ontario College faculty, all internal and external operations of Ontario
Colleges have temporarily ceased. At this time, Ontario college curriculum
communities lack their usual moderators and contributors to discussions about
curriculum. This means that I will lack
the evidence that I would normally be able to provide about connecting to this
community. I did consider becoming
involved in another community but decided that I wanted to learn more about
this particular community because it aligns to my aspirations in taking the PME
program: to prepare for a career path that is more teaching-focused within the
Ontario College system.
Another challenge that I would anticipate
is that CDAG is a closed system, meaning that membership is restricted to those
within the Ontario College system and likely to those who specifically play a
curriculum development and renewal role within their professional scope within
the system. From my research, I was
happy to discover that I personally know the moderator of this curriculum
community. She was one of my professors
decades ago when I attended Fleming College.
I have since served with her in the Prior Learning Assessment and
Recognition community. Knowing how she
supports higher learning, I would fully expect that she would allow me access
to this group for learning purposes. It
is also very likely that she would be very interested in my studies within the
PME program and the benefits it could bring to this curriculum community.
While the timing in unfortunate, I believe
that I can easily overcome these challenges with a simple conversation once the
faculty labour dispute is resolved. If I
am at all off track, I am sure that the leaders in this online forum will be
able to make other recommendations for engagement within curriculum communities
for aspiring curriculum specialists, like me.
3.
Examination of the Professional Context
As previously stated, I selected this
curriculum community because it represents the goals and directions of my
current professional context, and more specifically, the specialty area that I
wish to pursue within this context. I
want to be able to understand how curriculum can lead to high level learning
for students who must navigate a ill-structured problems within an even
less-structured labour market upon graduation.
Upon researching communities within this
closed system, I discovered that there is a group called CDAG (Curriculum
Developers Affinity Group), which exists to provide a forum for sharing of
resources, networking and supporting those who specialize specifically in
curriculum work within Ontario colleges (CDAG website). This group was begun in 2005. Their website outlines the purpose of the
group, which is paraphrased below.
CDAG exists to:
·
Contribute to quality curriculum within Ontario
colleges
·
Share information and develop best practices
·
Promote curriculum research
·
Advocate for system-wide efficiencies
·
Make province-wide recommendations on policies
and objectives
·
Provide development and sustainability of
curriculum expertise in Ontario colleges
·
Provide a forum for discussion about initiatives
·
Establish and guide subcommittees
While growth
in this curriculum community is centralized through CDAG, it can serve to
inform others, but disseminating the information at the local level. The members from Fleming College use the ideas
and contributions of others to then reach out to the faculty to offer new
information sources, practical tools and methods inspired by this
discussion. One such example of the
spin-off benefit is the Teaching Hub at Fleming College, a department that supports
faculty with teaching excellence services.
At Here, faculty can get their
daily dose of resources, ideas and inspiration.
I believe that this is important for faculty, who spend their days
differently than curriculum designers and need to be informed, but not
necessarily involved in the nuts and bolts of the CDAG curriculum-focused
community.At the Teaching Hub, the contributions of curriculum and teaching excellence focused positions then create a hub where ideas and inspirations can be exchanged, including, but not limited to curriculum design, instruction and assessment.
My work with local employers has informed
me about the needs of the local labour market and how employers often see
higher education as missing the mark.
They have explained to me the perceived gap between the skills gained
through college and the skills they need to progress in their chosen fields. While I believe that some employers have unreasonably
high expectations of graduates, not to mention standards of job readiness
without a training plan to support on-the-job learning , I do agree that post
secondary education needs to be nimble in it’s curriculum to meet the changing
needs of the labour market. I also see
that more can be done to integrate career and employment skills into today’s
curriculum to align it to the challenges with the different sectors. I believe that embedding career education
strengthens curriculum and makes it more relevant to student purpose of
education, which is often to create opportunities for career goals.
The initial contributions I would hope to
make would be about embedding career education into curriculum. A close friend of mine works in a meta-project
within our college to do just that.
Informed by her experience with faculty adopting these practices, I have
come to understand that career and labour market knowledge is not always intuitive. With this in mind, I would hope that my
contributions would serve to inform the members of the community about the
perceptions, constructive criticisms and expectations of employers who hire
entry level college graduates.
Bridging this knowledge gap has been my most supportive contribution in
other college communities and I would hope this community would be receptive to
what curriculum-embedded career content could do to enhance learning.
The CDAG serves to contribute to professional
growth of its members in the design, instruction and assessment phases of curriculum. It can serve to inform within specialty areas
where discipline content is important, but it can also support those who
endeavour to have a cross-curricular goals.
4. Analysis of Curriculum Community Environment
For the most part, this
curriculum community and it’s offshoots, are mostly looking at curriculum
through an Essentialism lens. I say this
because the topics of conversation are often centred around the specialty
skills, in the form of separate subjects, needed to succeed in a career path. According to Ornstein, the goal of Idealism
and Realism philosophies is to create a competent person and intellectual
growth (105). The career skills mastery
is best aligned to this concept of developing essential career skills. Here, the teacher is the expert in the chosen
field. The focus on Essentialism allows
for sharing of actual curriculum to ensure that there are opportunities for
fanning out the skill sets of a particular career across Ontario. Without this focus, schools could not as
easily promote new offerings, instead expending energy to reinvent the
curriculum wheel. This is particularly
important remote colleges or under-serviced career areas. Students can more easily get programs that
meet regional needs when colleges cooperate and collaborate. This helps to address skill shortages and
provide available options for those who seek work in a specific geographical
area.
However, often the dialogue
within the curriculum community goes to a more Social Reconstructionsim
philosophy, in that curriculum is being designed to confront social challenges
of “the real world”. Ornstein summarizes
Reconstructionism as the skills needed to promote active societal learning in
which the teacher is a change agent (105).
We see this in posts that seek to find new and novel ways to embed soft
skills or essential skills into career
related training. Here there is
reference to typical problems encountered by those in the field as good
opportunities for learning.
Technology is another curriculum
factor that comes up in these discussions.
However, the technology that is most often mentioned is not to guide the
curriculum as Technology curriculum conceptions do, but rather the means to
enhance the curriculum learning outcomes.
Technology without enhancement of learning does little to advance
curriculum.
As Hubball and Burt pointed out,
curriculum change should be more incremental than radical (53). These curriculum communities enable faculty
from community colleges to gain efficient access to ideas, resources and tools
to immediately inform the smaller and incremental curriculum changes and
experimentation that results.
The mode of communication that
best fits this space is called Exchange, which is a private forum for members
only. There are also features of
Blackboards for postings of ABC (Aligning and Building Curriculum), as well as
a Workroom. In the offshoots of this
curriculum hub, Twitter accounts are typically an effective and instantaneous
mode of communication that works well as teasers offering quick snippets of
conversation that ignite idea networks
I believe that CDAG continues to
challenge, and be challenged by, the learning needs of faculty within the
college system. It represents the
efforts to raise the bar for college-level education curriculum. The existence of this curriculum community is
evidence of cooperative spirit and the endless challenges of curriculum as it
adapts to produce learners who are ready to take on the challenges of the ever-changing
labour market. Vallance inquired, “What knowledge is most worth teaching, what
intellectual skills should be taught in the process, what arethe uses to which
they will be applied and which knowledge and skills are best suited to each
child’s interest and unique identities (25).
I think that curriculum communities, like CDAG, are wrestling with
Vallances key questions about the purpose and value of curriculum. Communities like CDAG give a forum for ideas
to mingle and percolate and become informed through experimentation that occur
in what Hubball and Burt saw in their vision for post-secondary curriculum
change as being incremental.
Sources:
Hubball, H & Burt H.
(2004, May 1). An integrated approach to developing and
implementing learning-centred curricula.
International Journal for Academic Development. University of British Columbia, Canada.
Ornstein, A.
(1990-1991). Philosophy as a basis for curriculum decisions. The High School Journal. University of North Carolina Press.
Vallance, E. (2001). A
second look at conflicting conceptions of curriculum. Theory Into Practise.
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