Curriculum: Foundations, Principles, and Issues

Addressing the dynamic social context within the field of curriculum, Curriculum: Foundations, Principles, and Issues challenges the reader to consider how new thinking in this area impacts curriculum deliberation, development, and implementation. The Fourth Edition provides both the student and the professor of curriculum with a comprehensive treatment of the field: curriculum foundations as well as the principles and procedures for conceptualizing, developing, implementing, and evaluating curriculum. As in previous editions, it provides solid coverage of the philosophical, historical, psychological, and social foundations of curriculum. Recent research and thinking in these areas is included, providing new information on, for example, the reconceptualists, learning styles and developmental psychology, American modal personality, charter schools and privatizations, and Goals 2000. It places curriculum within the dynamic social context, both present and emerging, and presents a balanced treatment of the various issues confronting the field. Throughout the text, the reader is engaged in considering the tension between postmodern thinking and modern thinking and how they are impacting curriculum deliberation, development, and implementation. Coverage of the social foundations of curriculum develops the idea that curriculum cannot be divorced from its social context. The diversity of the American society and what it means for school curricula is included in this discussion. Updated to include the most current thinking in curriculum, the text engages the reader in its discussion of both technical and non-technical models of curriculum development. Ornstein and Hunkins discuss these models, not to urge acceptance of a narrow view of curriculum thinking, but to allow students to comprehend the assumptions behind these models and to learn how they might utilize these models in a changing and emerging curriculum environment.