Essentialism vs. Progressivism
Essentialism is structured, focused on accountability and meeting standards. Progressivism is child-centered, encourages active learning, and realizes that education is not just a preparation for life. While both of these education theories seem to be completely opposite, they have a few similarities. Both of these theories want the children to succeed, they are just going in different ways to accomplish this. Essentialism has high standards and test the students using high stakes tests. Some progressive schools that are currently operating have incredibly high standards also. Essentialism is known for going “back to the basics,” but in a way progressivism is also. While essentialism stresses basic academic skill, a school focusing on progressivism might do something like grow a garden to understand where food comes from. While these are different kinds of basic skills, they are comparable.
Essentialism and progressivism have few similarities and many more differences. Essentialism is considered the “conservative” theory and progressivism is considered the “liberal” theory. Essentialism could be described as rigid, with the teacher as a supervisor and the students looked at as inanimate objects in which knowledge can be poured into. Progressivism acknowledges that students are not like buckets where knowledge can be just poured into them. Students are living organisms that learn by doing and they need to actively participate in their education with adults serving as advisors. Instead of the essentialism approach of constantly testing students to ensure they are learning what they need to know, progressivism is flexible allowing students to select electives that are interesting to them. While essentialism is strict, students take more difficult classes that can better prepare them for college. Because of the progressivism approach to let students explore different electives they might back away from taking upper level math and science classes or a foreign language. Yet, progressivism can be more entertaining, while essentialism can be boring to students. Both have their benefits, and somewhat of a healthy combination between the two could be the answer.
Criteria for a curriculum vocabulary selection
Since it is impossible to teach the whole of a language, all methods must in some way or other whether intentionally or not, select the part of it they intend to teach. However, the shosen vocabulary must meet the following criteria
- Teachability: they can easily be illustrated through material.
- Similarity: they are similar to words in the native language. Ex: sofa, tofu, papa, mommy.
- Availability: group of words. Ex: colors, tools of classroom, fruit, food.
- Coverage: words that cover or include the meaning of other words. Ex: emotion( happy, sad, angry, depress)
- Defining power: they are useful in defining other words.
Grammar Selection and Gradation
Selection
• Selection of grammar should be based on: Simplicity, Centrality, and Learnability, in adition to gradation:
Gradation
Approaches of gradations
- Linear gradation orders: east to hard
- Cyclical gradation: Repetition
- Spiral gradation: old to new
3 Dimensions of a Curriculum |
||
|---|---|---|
| Input Forward design |
Process (methodology) Central design |
Output Backward design |
| refers to the linguistic content of a course that should be Selected organized into teachable and learnable units arranged in a rational sequence The result is a syllabus |
Refers to how teaching is carried out and constitutes the domain of methodology in language teaching. Throughout the 20th C there was a movement away from • Mastery oriented approaches focusing on the production of accurate samples of language use. • Activity oriented approaches focusing on interactive and communicative classroom processes. |
Refers to learning outcomes. That is, what learners are able to do as the result of a period of instruction. Language teaching since the late 19th C has seen a change in the intended outputs of learning from knowledge based to performance based outputs |
The starting point of curriculum development
Each starting point reflects different
assumptions about both, the means and ends of teaching and learning.
When we start from the:
- Input: The
focus is on the content and the main goal is to master the content
- Process: it
goes against the input design, in the sense that it gives more importance to
teaching activities rather than the content.
- outcomes:
Goals come first, and based on them the process and content are selected
