The curriculum perspectives model: providing language to the nature of the curriculum

Curriculum design is increasingly collective. As a result, the various preferences for the nature of designers’ curricula become more visible, especially when a curriculum is viewed as productive, as creating and limiting realities. This notion became clear through a four-year curriculum co-design project of nine teams of lecturers, researchers and students, funded as a Comenius Leadership Fellowship by the Dutch Ministry of Education. The co-design processes illustrated the importance of being explicit about individual preferences for the nature of the curriculum. Practice and scholarly work showed that a comprehensive model was still lacking. Therefore, in this study, a new model was created by integrating scholarly work. The new model includes four perspectives on the nature of the curriculum along two axes–knowing/knower and fixed/fluid–resulting in curriculum-as-societal-(re)production; curriculum-as-knowledge-carrier; curriculum-as-student-experiences, and curriculum-as-outcomes. The fifth perspective is curriculum-as-plan and is placed at the centre of the model; it has a more technical orientation. This model provides a language to discuss preferences for the nature of the curriculum, by curriculum co-designers. It can assist academic developers to support such a debate and help to make curriculum co-design more efficient.