Higher Education Curriculum

The term curriculum has been associated with academic study and training in higher education since its appearance in vernacular English in the sixteenth century. At several points in its history, the term not only defined an identifiable course or plan of study in a university context, it also referred to the corollary body of scholars engaged in that coursework. As such, curricula refer to both an individual and collective learning experience. In common terminology, a curriculum vitae (literally, the course of one's life) is the accepted form of an academic resume, a brief account of a scholar's education and career.

In the United States, the curriculum designated the form and content of baccalaureate experience in early American colleges beginning with Harvard College in 1636. Because the term lent itself readily to documents in both English and Latin, university administrators and faculty used it frequently, and it appears consistently throughout seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources. As institutions of higher education expanded rapidly throughout the period preceding the Civil War, the essential curricula forming the core of their instruction continued to follow the academic inheritance of the classical Greek schools and medieval European universities. The quadrivium–the "higher" arts of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music–fortified more basic instruction in the trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic. As early American universities matured, national and institutional leaders influenced curricula and advanced new ideas concerning university philosophy and purpose, especially as land-grant institutions and state universities were founded across the country in the nineteenth century. Academic course offerings in higher education typically reflected both federally recognized and funded curricula along with more localized learning needs. In this respect, curricula continue to serve functions recognizable in higher education today.

While most modern academic departments can trace their roots to the historic plans of study described in the quadrivium and trivium, more recent developments reflect the increasing specialization of academic and administrative systems within institutions of higher education in the United States. In the twentieth century, most societal institutions invoked rational principles and a scientific method of development. Just as the Industrial Revolution fueled technological advances in the nineteenth century, technological revolutions have propelled the form and function of educational institutions. In the latter half of the twentieth century, increasing percentages of the adult population in the United States enrolled in increasingly diverse types of colleges, universities, and vocational programs. The national demographic of education has shifted, and the curriculum in higher education has responded to and reflected changing political, socioeconomic, and cultural dynamics. Growing recognition of professional fields and the attendant expansion of professional education has also fostered curricular adaptation and evolution. As these developments have changed expectations for higher education, they have also transformed perspectives on the meaning and development of curricula.

Reflecting on Curriculum in Higher Education in the United States

Curriculum enables people to make sense of our lives and the world around them. Individuals use curriculum with varying degrees of intentionality to interpret events, to deepen their understanding of what they learn and who they are as learners, and to create a shared experience for teaching and learning. In simplest terms, any curriculum presents an academic plan, a designed progression of coursework framing a student's experience in higher education. Certain curricula or designed plans mandate more rigidity and more refined coursework for the student, but minimum undergraduate requirements commonly include these emphases: inquiry and critical thinking; enhanced literacy; numerical comprehension; historical consciousness; scientific, ethical, and artistic pursuits; some kind of international or multicultural experience; and in-depth study in the student's chosen topic or field.

Consonant with emerging conceptions of curriculum, contemporary perspectives on the curriculum in higher education in the United States consider the necessity of such academic plans and planning as representative of both educational and social experience, as a way of being in, understanding, and assessing a constantly changing world. In turn, researchers and practitioners alike are focusing on learning experiences in general and shared learning experiences in particular. Researchers in curricular studies regularly engage sociological, historical, cultural, psychological, and pedagogical issues in quantitative and qualitative inquiries. Increasing emphasis has been placed on measuring the outcomes of curricular design and implementation, measurements that help students and teachers alike determine the efficacy of curricula, the students' balance between a breadth of knowledge and depth in training, and the continuity of learning and experience.

Developing Shared Learning Experiences: Recurring and Emerging Models of Curricula

Several theorists have described the design, organization, and delivery of curricula in higher education, and scholars and practitioners from all disciplines have suggested approaches to curricular planning. Many of these approaches are anchored in the rationalist tradition underpinning institutions of higher education in the United States and offer rational models to guide contemporary curricular planning.

Ralph Tyler, arguably the first commentator on postsecondary curricula in the United States, published Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction in 1949. He posited four essential questions that could be used to structure knowledge in educational contexts: (1) What purpose shall the curriculum serve? (2) What experiences should the institution and its faculty provide to meet these expressed purposes? (3) How might the curriculum be organized most effectively? (4) How can one best determine the outcomes of learning–the purposes and attainment of the curriculum?

In her 1962 book Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice, Hilda Taba provided, in essence, the first manual for curricular planning for a generation of college and university leaders. Taba furthered Tyler's essential questions by arguing that a change in the curriculum signals a change in the institution and charges teachers to play an active role in establishing goals and objectives for learning. Taba introduced a seven-step model for developing curriculum, and her efforts to create an orderly process spurred educational scholars to develop additional models and approaches.

Paul Dressel (1968) and Clifton Conrad (1978) advanced rational approaches that acknowledged Tyler's and Taba's seminal works but provided a more modern perspective on topics such as decision-making strategies, political influence, and the role of stakeholders in the curricular planning process. In the early 1980s, William H. Bergquist and his colleagues described eight curricular models that encompassed all undergraduate experience in the United States, models that described knowledge structured according to institutional mission and purpose: thematic, competency, career, experience, student, values, future, and heritage. Since the publication of their 1981 book Designing Undergraduate Education, other leading curricular scholars have refined and revealed diagnostic and formulaic assessments drawing upon the taxonomy of Bergquist and his colleagues and the curricular dimensions, or elements, essential to organizing curriculum. In a 1983 article Conrad and Anne M. Pratt examined these elements and introduced a model that considered inputs or curricular design variables that influence the process. Joan S. Stark and Lisa R. Lattuca, authors of the 1997 book Shaping the College Curriculum: Academic Plans in Action, also considered influences upon the planning process, in particular the characteristics of academic disciplines. They revisited the idea of curriculum as an academic plan and suggested that this can be used to develop a course, a program, or even a comprehensive college curriculum.

Since the 1980s several curricular scholars, including Kenneth A. Bruffee, William G. Tierney, Jennifer Grant Haworth, and Conrad, have advanced a perspective that acknowledges students as active participants in determining and assessing their learning experiences in higher education. Their work, along with that of Marcia Baxter Magolda, Marcia Mentkowski, and Becky Ropers-Huilman, marks a departure from traditional, rational approaches and embraces the view that curriculum is more than a static plan created by faculty to direct the academic progress of students. These scholars contend that curriculum is socially constructed and, as such, reflects the engagement of students, teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders. This perspective is attracting renewed attention as enrollment and hiring patterns continue to shift in higher education. College and university students embody the most culturally diverse segment of the national population in the history of the United States, and they will inherit a complex of social, political, economic, and environmental problems. While the composition of student enrollment has changed, so has the number of students. In the early twenty-first century some 70 percent of high school graduates in the United States matriculated in some form of higher education, and educators have pointed to the need for the curriculum to address more holistically a learner's lifelong experience and the profound variation characterizing these experiences.

Emerging Challenges in Creating Shared Experiences

Arguably the most significant opportunity for leaders of learning communities will be to create enriching shared experiences in healthy tension with diverse individual needs and interests. Existing and emergent perspectives on learning and curricular design, however, are not value-neutral and have engendered unprecedented competition and conflict. Fewer and fewer curricula, too, accommodate comprehensive training for individual learning styles and needs; national trends reflect increasing specialization and fragmentation of subject matter and methodology. Those who wish to create shared learning experiences will face challenges from within and beyond academe, challenges that ask people to understand their roles as teachers and learners, incorporate multiple perspectives on curricular content, and reconsider established curricular features including general education, the liberal arts, and the academic major.

Incorporating multiple perspectives on curricular content. Like any other aspect of an educational institution, the curriculum responds to external and internal forces and reflects the identity, assumptions, and perspectives of decision makers affecting it. Curricular development and practice are not apolitical processes, nor are they static. A flurry of publications in the national media in the early 1980s testified to the importance of curricula in higher education; not only was the curriculum seen as an academic construct, it was also understood to be the repository of cultures, both national and multinational, and the historic medium for the transmission of cultural themes. The conflict of the so-called Culture Wars at the center of the discourse over educational missions and curricula in the 1980s and 1990s reflected a larger and longer shift in the national demographic of education. As more and more women and minorities matriculated in institutions of higher education, the curricula available to them as learners broadened as a result of this development. Some educational leaders and programs balked at more inclusive measures to redesign the curriculum, but the resurgent interest in control of curricula clearly signaled that what students read, and who decides what they will be reading, still shapes the national conversation about higher education and its purpose. Unlike any other single feature of an educational institution, the curriculum represents the core values and shared beliefs of communities. Developing shared learning experiences, then, requires that educational leaders invite and engage the values and beliefs of not one, but many communities.

Balancing the individual and collective experience. Curriculum is the rational conversation between learner and coursework in higher education. It is the students' experience, on any given campus, of any given course; each syllabus represents one sequential or supporting piece of evidence that students have indeed engaged the institution. Curricula are as distinct as learners, and more differentiated than ever before in the history of education, in terms of guiding framework, applications and practices, and enrollments. Just as the term was used to imply both direction and pace in its original context in Latin, curriculum, much like a river, follows both a recognizably fluid and formed course.

In the United States, people in the twenty-first century will likely change careers and jobs several times in the course of their productive years. As the nature of employment changes within society, educational goals likewise shift. Curricula serve as an important measure of learning and student achievement within a shifting landscape, so any institutional assessment of curriculum should provide compelling answers to increasingly demanding questions and needs of the society, the state agencies funding higher education, and the individual learners and participants themselves.

Understanding general education as the formed course. In the typical college and university setting, general education courses structure the core instruction that is provided by and required by the institution, and these courses usually occupy the first two years of coursework, regardless of a student's designated or intended field of study. These courses stress skills rather than specialized intellectual training, and they are usually designed to overlook disciplinary boundaries, to articulate and expand the implications of knowledge for students. Educators have long agreed that the integration of general requirements within curricula should repeatedly emphasize learning how to learn, the common process by which each individual student integrates their advancing knowledge and skills. Students must be able to meaningfully relate their classroom experiences and the insights they gain in less structured environments. Likewise, general education courses, or core requirements, at most institutions of higher education are designed to evoke the analytical and interpretive sensibilities of scholars and of learning communities, while also providing broader frames of reference for students.

The purpose of general education requirements is to provide coherence and unity in an otherwise specialized undergraduate experience, and to promote the social and intellectual integration of the students enrolled in these courses. Many university leaders have also argued that general education requirements provide students with readily accessible strategies for discerning truth, knowledge, and insight, that is, developing the most general and most useful skills and habits of the mind.

General education requirements are intended to provide a common experience but critics contend that such requirements cannot resolve the problems created by fragmentation and specialization. General education must be considered in concert with liberal and disciplinary studies in order to create meaningful, shared learning experiences.

Recognizing liberal arts as a tradition of fluidity. In historical consideration of higher education, the liberal arts have formed a core curriculum since the formation of medieval universities in Europe, and they comprise a tradition of intellectual training that transferred to most American universities. In theory, a liberal education affords educational experience that encourages and sustains lifelong learning–an education defined not necessarily by specific knowledge, as Paul L. Dressel explained in 1968, but instead by the ways in which individuals think and behave. In practice, the curricula of liberal arts balances innovative and imitative subject matter for undergraduates, generating a breadth of knowledge and depth of insight in the course of required readings. The historical emphasis of the liberal arts is tangible and includes the essential courses listed in the quadrivium and trivium; in modern institutions of higher education, however, the subject matter, pedagogy, and consequential learning of a liberal education typically orient students to the broad array of disciplines represented in the humanities in the evolved curriculum of medieval universities. A liberal arts curriculum asserts that certain texts have been proven historically to be most instructive to think with, although all texts might be useful to think about. In closer reading of these selected texts–the canon–learners engage in elemental inquiry, gaining insights into the nature and meaning of life, human purpose and ethos, and societal organization and improvement.

Leading theorists of liberal curricula have suggested that such an education improves students' cultural awareness and supports the education mission with an identifiable moral agency that affords students an appreciation of wisdom gained in the past. The emphasis is on knowledge as its own end–that learning is valuable for its own sake, and that learners engaged in learning on such levels inherently contribute in service to their communities, in the solution of complex problems, or in the creation of more informed public policies.

Understanding the purpose of the academic major. Under the influence of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European university models, specific academic fields of study began to appear in the United States in the twentieth century, and since the 1950s, majors have become the standard units of curricular organization, the most obvious identifying feature of any student's coursework. Faculty and scholars affiliated with institutions of higher education have rearranged and aligned themselves according to subject matter and specialized areas of interest and research; departments have relocated themselves within institutions in more segmented and narrowly defined components. Learners are asked to organize and align their own interests and coursework according to these educational constructs. The dominant scientific paradigm mandates increasingly refined focus in order to further inquiry and specify useful study. Rapidly expanding numbers of departments, majors, minors, and subspecialties have occurred throughout American higher education since the 1970s. Recognizably interdisciplinary fields of study (such as the liberal arts) have subsequently receded. This, some critics charge, has encouraged an overemphasis on specialization and denies students the opportunity for a liberal education.