Curriculum Development

SAIDE Resource Centre Holdings

Hype around the recently released curriculum review report, A South African Curriculum for the 21st Century: Report of the Review Committee on Curriculum 2005 (Curriculum 21 Report), affords me an opportunity to share with you some of our holdings on the subject. Altogether, we have over three hundred titles on curriculum development, which include books, chapters in books, and serial articles. Some of our more recent acquisitions report on earlier evaluation and research work on Curriculum 2005:

Changing Curriculum: Studies on Outcomes Based Education in South Africa by Jonathan Jansen and Pam Christie. Cape Town : Juta, 1999

This title discusses why outcomes-based education is the most controversial educational policy reform in the history of South African education. It provides a critical analysis of outcomes-based education, its potential to succeed, and its inherent implications for the education system. The book constructs a much-needed dialogue between various players in the educational field, including teachers, lecturers, government officials, curriculum theorists, and policymakers.

An evaluation of Curriculum 2005 (C2005) and outcomes-based education (OBE) in Gauteng Province

Khulisa Management Services prepared an evaluation of Curriculum 2005 and outcomes-based education in Gauteng Province for the Gauteng Institute for Curriculum Development in 1999. The evaluation was designed to answer six research questions:

- What has been the experience in implementing OBE-Curriculum 2005 in Grade 1 during 1998 (with special examination of learner assessment practice and the availability/use of learner materials)?

- How adequate was preparation in 1997 for Grade 1 implementation during 1998?

- How adequate is 1998 preparation of Grade 2 (for implementing C2005 in 1999)?

• What has been the process for introducing and promulgating OBE and Curriculum 2005 at provincial, district, and school levels?
• How successful has this process been?
• What do Gauteng education professionals (administrators, educators, policy makers, etc.) think about the concept of Curriculum 2005?
• How has OBE-Curriculum 2005 impacted on learner performance?

Review of Recent Trends on Teaching and Learning in Mathematics and Science Education with Implications for a South African Mathematics and Science Education Strategy within the context of Lifelong Learning Development

This review by Michael Kahn and John Volmink was commissioned by the Department of Education during 1999. The review outlined the following:

• Recent learning theories in science and mathematics education;
• The relationship between those learning theories and policy, especially with respect to Curriculum 2005 and FET;
• Strategies of developed and developing countries aimed at improving the teaching and learning of science and mathematics; and
• Implications of the above for the policy; research and development agenda in science and mathematics in the context of lifelong learning.

School Curriculum Since Apartheid: Intersections of Politics and Policy in the South African Transition by Jonathan D Jansen. Journal of Curriculum Studies, vol.31, no.1, 1999 pp57-67. London : Taylor and Francis

The abstract of this article is as follows: ‘In the wake of South African’s first non-racial elections in 1994, the new Minister of Education launched a national process which would purge the apartheid curriculum of its most offensive racial content and outdated, inaccurate subject matter. At first glance, these essential alterations to school syllabuses sounded reasonable and timely given the democratic non-racial ideals of the new government. However, these syllabus alterations had little to do with changing the school curriculum and much more to do with a precarious crisis of legitimacy facing the state and education in the months following the national elections. The haste with which the state pursued a superficial cleansing of the inherited curriculum is explained in terms of the political constraints, conflicts and compromises which accompanied the South African transitions from apartheid.’

In conclusion, my colleague John Gultig, who has worked on the SAIDE Study of Education Project, reiterated that the Curriculum 21 report states that many people have conflated the terms outcomes based education and Curriculum 2005. OBE is a philosophy/paradigm guiding teaching and learning and thus is globally applicable, while C2005 was a curriculum plan for a particular country.