University teachers’ role in curriculum development

Abstract

This study explores the conceptions that university teachers have of curriculum decision making and development within three different disciplines as well as the space and agency of university teachers in the curriculum process. The study makes use of Basil Bernstein’s concepts of the classification and framing of the pedagogic discourse of higher education disciplines and applies them to the pedagogic discourse of three disciplines (i.e. mechanical and industrial engineering, anthropology and physics) within one university to demonstrate how it appears in traditions, communication, planning of instruction, student identity and teachers’ role. The three disciplines were explored as specific cases. Data were collected through interviews, observations and analysis of texts. Twenty-two interviews were conducted with fifteen university teachers, eight staff meetings observed and a variety of texts relating to the curriculum were analysed. Mixed phenomenological methods of data analysis were applied, such as looking for common themes and discourse analysis. The main findings of the study confirm the existence of a local pedagogic discourse of each discipline, characterised by different aims of the discipline, different conceptions of student identities and teacher roles, and specific instructional discourse. The local pedagogic discourse is created when universal pedagogic discourse is recontextualised within a local socio-cultural context. The transformation creates spaces for different ideologies (personal, disciplinary, institutional and external). In the transformation process, or in the curriculum development, the university teachers hold a significant and powerful role. The local pedagogic discourse is most strongly influenced by teacher conceptions acquired during their own time of studying the discipline and their experience of teaching. The discipline’s organisational culture and structure as well as its saga both mould the local pedagogic discourse and create its social context within which different contesting ideologies arise. In the study, Bernstein’s concepts were further used to analyse the organisational structure of the three different disciplinary departments and to demonstrate how they lend themselves differently to teachers’ cooperation in curriculum decision making and development. The study showed that curriculum decision making and development is not experienced as troublesome or problematic among participants in the study but rather as part of everyday routine. The study demonstrated that the teachers in the study sense different authority and agency in curriculum decision making between, as well as within, the disciplinary curricula. While teachers within anthropology experienced significant academic freedom in selecting course content for their students, teachers within physics claimed the selection was based on adherence to ‘universal curriculum’ ideas rather than local needs, teachers’ research or personal standpoints. In engineering, local ties were evident in course selection where teachers took the needs of the local field into account. During the period of study the local pedagogic discourses of the three disciplines were faced with different internal and external forces making their mark on the curriculum. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications for the curriculum field of higher education. Theoretically, they demonstrate the strength of applying Bernstein’s theoretical concepts to study the complicated concept of curriculum within the social and cultural context of higher education. They provide a framework for exploring differences found between disciplines within the same institution. On a more practical level, the study demonstrates the importance of seeing teaching and learning as disciplinary specific and acknowledges the different boundaries and spaces experienced by teachers within different disciplines. The analysis of different types of departmental organisation, and pedagogic discourses that operate within them, enhances our understanding of the possibilities, as well as boundaries, of curriculum development in higher education. Different departmental structures, allow for different types of communities of practice that can