Chapters in Books (Curriculum Studies)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/740

Browse

Browsing Chapters in Books (Curriculum Studies) by Subject "Curriculum -- Research"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Introductory chapter
    (AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2011) Bitzer, Eli; Botha, Nonnie
    INTRODUCTION: Inquiry into higher education curricula or, what is sometimes referred to in a broader sense as ‘the curriculum’ in higher education, is a complex business. One important reason for this is that higher education institutions operate in increasingly super-complex environments (Barnett 2000, 2003, 2011) while the very idea of ‘the curriculum’ is unstable and its boundaries vague (Barnett & Coate 2005). Typical questions that arise on the issue of curriculum inquiry include whether the curriculum is merely confined to intended educational experiences and stated outcomes or whether the hidden curriculum should also be accounted for. What are the external and internal forces exerting pressures on the curriculum? Does the curriculum focus on the actual lived learning experiences of students or does it extend outside of the seminar, the classroom, the tutorial, the laboratory, the library or the computer centre? Does the curriculum have boundaries in terms of its geography, allocated time or responsibility? Where does the institutional concern for the curriculum start and end? Where do issues such as pedagogy, teaching, learning and assessment overlap within or across the curriculum? All of these questions and many others make curriculum inquiry a vast and complex field that cannot be even closely addressed within the confines of a single book.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Trans-disciplinarity and curriculum space in health sciences education master's programmes
    (AFRICAN SUN MeDIA, 2011) Bitzer, Eli
    INTRODUCTION: The level of complexity of modern-day challenges demands a wider approach than discipline-specific measures can provide (Max-Neef 2005). These measures no longer suffice when they involve major environmental, human and social challenges. Also, relatively minor challenges such as emerging health issues, how to provide students with powerful learning opportunities and how to facilitate learning in particular social and institutional contexts are difficult to solve at the disciplinary level. Most of these challenges require trans-disciplinary approaches. Ironically, many higher education institutions still maintain mono-disciplinary courses and programmes and expect of students to do the transfer and integration of knowledge among disciplines or fields of study themselves. Moreover, the situation is not solved by creating teams of ‘specialists’ to address complex problems. An accumulation of visions or insights might emerge from each participating discipline, but an integrating synthesis is not achieved through the accumulation of ‘different brains’. Integration and synthesis rather seem to be more productive ‘within each of the brains’ (Max-Neef 2005:5) and thus higher education programmes need to be oriented in ways that make trans-disciplinary knowledge possible. In this chapter the concepts of ‘trans-disciplinarity’ and ‘curriculum space’ are discussed in the context of a cross-faculty coursework and research master’s programme where these concepts are seen as being represented by the possibilities and realities of curriculum integration (Nowotny 2006) as well as by the problem-solving characteristics of the curriculum in question.