JOURNAL OF CURRICULUM STUDIES (J.C.S.)
Year:2010 | Volume:5 | Issue:18|Papers Count:8

This article starts with two preliminary remarks. One has to do with the rate of participation of curriculum specialists in the development process which is deemed to be utterly inadequate. The second preliminary observation deals with the very title chosen for this document. The title, it is argued, is not a mere nominal element but is conducive to misconception of the substance of the document. The author believes that contrary to what current title entails, the document itself is not “a national curriculum”, rather, it is “national curriculum framework” addressing major policies and strategies with respect to school curriculum. The main body of the article, however, is a detailed critical reading of two major curriculum policy embodied in the document. The first, concerns with the issue of decentralization or what the author refers to as emancipation scheme. This issue is considered to be the reason d’être of efforts at devising the national curriculum framework in Iran which conducts its educational operations within a centralized scheme. The statements included in the document are assessed to be qt best confused. The second issue discussed and evaluated in this article is a critical design issue, namely curriculum integration. Observations made to this end, points to the insufficient and superficial encounter of developers with this influential aspect of curriculum with transformative impact on the culture of schools.

Educational foundations and consequently curriculum foundations speak about human status, its possibilities and limitations, and necessities that have influenced his/ her life. In other word, foundation is concern about reality that means, what is not what should be. Foundation of curriculum, not only determines the principles and direction of the curriculum development process, but also gives spirit to all parts and elements of curriculum and is used by curriculum developers as a strong criterion for indicating and shaping them. For this reason, philosophy of education is one of the deep and important issue of the curriculum studies since it helps to shape the foundations. In fact, the relation between philosophy and curriculum in any educational system is so powerful and lasting that it is not an exaggeration to say that philosophy is the beginning and end of curriculum as well as its process.

This paper presents a picture of the feasible implementation of the newly proposed National Curriculum in Iran, and attempts to show that how much “the implementing considerations of this curriculum” fits with the “global and national experiences” of curriculum implementations. For this purpose, the author analyzed the relative documents and observations. The study showed that the implementation of large scales curriculum requires four levels of decision makings including; definition of views, indication of approaches, selection of methods and establishment of an implementation style. Although there is a compilation of positive experiences in the past regarding curriculum implementations, it seems that writers of the proposed National Curriculum have not taken them into consideration. On the contrary, it looks like that the writers prefer to use a differenciative view, engineering approach and incremental method for the implementation of the proposed National Curriculum in which, some parts of the present curriculum is accepted as suitable along with the implementation of the proposed curriculum. As well, the implementation of a program necessitates the agreement of stakeholders, human resources, facilities, and monitoring. But, in describing the implementation of the proposed document, there is little or no attention pays to these four categories. However, for the evaluation of the necessary requirements for implementation of the National Curriculum of the I.R. of Iran, the valuable experiences of the evaluation of two educational systems in Iran and the international experiences have been available and yet, it seems that this document has been prepared independent of these experiences.

Every national curriculum document consists of several components and goals are among the most important and fundamental ones. Thus, the formulation and statement of goals is a delicate matter that requires thoughtful considerations. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to have a critique of the statement of goals in the National Curriculum Document of the I.R. of Iran- third edition. To serve this purpose, at first, a model for the statement of goals at three levels of conceptual, propositional and systemic is described. Further, with regard to four criteria including internal consistency, external consistency, horizontal relations and vertical relations, this model is critically investigated. The results of the investigation indicate that despite the innovation in using the pyramid/matrix way of stating the goals, the model suffers from the lack of internal and external consistency, and the horizontal and vertical relations are not precise and clear.

In past few decades, many research projects have been conducted to better understand the congnitive nature of mind and the neurological processes that occur during thinking and learning. New neurological research findings show that human mind develops through real and conceived experiences. These research findings are consistent with assimilation and accommodation in Piaget’s developmental theory of intelligence, as well as Vygotesky’s Zone of Proximal Development and they all have clear and pratical implications for curriculum decisiom makers. The developmental theories of intelligence and the relevant research findings indicate that the development process is flexible and is influenced by individual’s economic, social and cultural conditions. Furthere, individuals’ developmental processes have much in common that allows curriculum dicision makers to identify levels and key stages of schooling. Thus, considering these theoretical approaches and experimental findings, it is necessary to design an educational system in such a manner that learners have opportunities to move along the key stages with their own pace and based on their different abilities and capabilities. Therefore, the new National Curriculum Document of the I.R. of Iran should pay attention to both educational structure and flexibility of the content (prescribed, semi- prescribed and not prescribed). This enables students with various characteristics to benefit the educational programs suitable to their needs.

The paper has a glance at the newly released National Curriculum document in Iran. Then, there is an emphasis on the mathematics curriculum as one of the major learning areas of this and every curriculum document at local or national level as well. The paper continues with a glimpse of historical overview of curriculum development movements in Iran and worldwide. Further, with a slight tolerance, the paper refers to the “Education Constitution” (Ghanoon e Asasi e Ma’aref) as the first national curriculum document in Iran, and after that, focuses on the mathematics learning area of the new document using the qualitative content analysis. At last, some speculations about the ways in which a curriculum document could lead to the development of a mathematics curriculum and mathematics textbook are presented.

In this paper, some of the major elements of the National Curriculum of I.R. of Iran (3rd edition) were reviewed to find out the degree of their consistency with the main themes of the Islamic educational philosophy and its implications for this document. The first part of the paper is devoted to the establishment of the bases for criticism of the “National Curriculum” and its evaluation criteria. Thus, the first step has been introducing the “educational philosophy of the I.R. of Iran” as an example of “Islamic educational philosophy” that its major themes are interactive, incremental and unified view of “education”; a multi-layer, integrative, and dynamic picture of “identity”, and a hierarchical and two dimensional look at “hayat e tayebeh-” and preparation for that. Thus, it is necessary for the formal educational system to pay specific emphasis to the development of common identity, upbringing public at large to become ready to have purified lives, and acquire basic competencies for that. In addition, the paper addresses the important characteristics of a national curriculum including a broad and unified concept of curriculum, the compulsory (core), selective and elective dimensions of curriculum, and paying attention to situation and unification as two major approaches for critical review of curriculum. Based on these characteristics and approaches that have been extracted from the “educational philosophy of the I.R. of Iran”, the second part of the paper is devoted to the critical review of the 3rd edition of the National Curriculum of the I.R. of Iran. The study shows that despite the great consistency between the philosophical and religious foundations of two documents, still the important themes of the “educational philosophy of the I.R. of Iran” have been ignored. Thus, it has caused the prevalence of fragmentary approach to education and curriculum.

This paper aims to do a content analysis of the National Curriculum of the I.R. of Iran in order to indicate the amount of consistency between this document and the components of the multi- cultural education. To do this, the theoretical foundation of multi- cultural education was studied and then, the components of this kind of education were identified for the content analysis of the document. The results show that relatively speaking, the document has paid attention to the components of multi- cultural education. In particular, section on “methods of the assessment of educational achievement” pays adequate attention to these components. However, the section on “teaching- learning strategies” ignores these components. Yet, the sections on “philosophical and scientific foundations”, “principles governing the educational programs” and “goal descriptions of educational levels” have paid attention to these components to some degree.