Reconfiguring Bruner: Compressing the Spiral Curriculum

Autor/in	Gibbs, Brian C.
Titel	Reconfiguring Bruner: Compressing the Spiral Curriculum
Quelle	In: Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (2014) 7, S.41-44 (4 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0031-7217
Schlagwörter	Sequential Approach; Curriculum Development; Elementary Secondary Education; Alignment (Education); Teaching Methods; State Standards; California + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Schrittfolge; Curriculum; Development; Curriculumentwicklung; Lehrplan; Entwicklung; Teaching method; Lehrmethode; Unterrichtsmethode; Kalifornien
Abstract	This article addresses the work of Jerome Bruner, a famed psychologist of education, who is considered to be very responsible for how education and learning are conceived today. In 1959, Bruner brought together scholars from many academic disciplines to focus on redesigning curriculum and thus redesigning the foundation of American schools. Bruner intoned: "...that any subject can be taught in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development," detailing his idea commonly referred to as the "spiral curriculum." In short, students revisit a topic, theme, or subject several times throughout their schooling, where the complexity of the topic is increased with each visit so that the new learning is connected to the old learning. The spiral curriculum is a profound and powerful idea, one that has been so embedded in how policy makers and educators think about curriculum and pedagogy that it is largely second nature, unexamined, and unrecognized. This author contends that, while Bruner was correct in concept, he was wrong in scope. The spiral curriculum works well if narrowed. The opposing voices note that rather than aligning the curriculum to be sequentially built upon itself for the entire K-12 education of children, the curriculum should be built around the growth of intellectual and academic skills and processes and ever-increasing content complexity in each semester and year of each subject. In this way, the curriculum, assignments, and assessments systemically and sequentially grow upon one another, or spiral, but in a much more focused and intentional way. The article concludes that Bruner was right, but his scale was wrong. His conception of spiral curriculum delivery is accurate from a broad perspective, but its implementation needs to be more compressed. (ERIC).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2017/4/10