Van den Akker gets us to consider the substantive curriculum questions. Also, there are more broad organisational factors that are identified as important to our curriculum design, such as ‘ time’ and ‘ location’. ![]() These include a consideration of the values and principles that drive our curriculum decisions (the ‘rationale’ – or ‘intent’ in OFSTED parlance). Van den Akker specifies ten key components to curriculum development. Though it can be helpful to limit notions of curriculum to the ‘what’ of the knowledge and skills that are to be taught, it does not encompass many meaningful related components that determine how such curriculum development is implemented in the classroom. Van den Akker gets us asking more questions of curriculum, revealing more interconnected threads of the spiderweb.Įxploring the threads of the curriculum spiderweb Jan van den Akker, Curriculum Landscapes and Trends (2003) Van den Akker specifically marks out different facets of curriculum development and implementation in his spiderweb: Done well, it is a beautiful result borne of effort and skill however, like the natural spiderweb, it is also vulnerable, and its intricacies (subtleties of phase and subject, perhaps) can too easily be swept away by more powerful forces. The metaphor is apt primarily because a spiderweb is so intricately woven and interconnected, just like curriculum development. Perhaps my favourite metaphor, outside of those already mentioned, from the curriculum theory of Jan van den Akker, is the ‘ curriculum spiderweb‘. As curriculum is complex, we routinely seek out a plethora of handy metaphors and analogies to make sense of it.Īnd so, in recent years curriculum has recently been described with a multitude of metaphors, such as a boxset (more Game of Thrones than the Simpsons), a voyage of exploration, or curriculum as narrative.Įach metaphor has explanatory value and helps bring some concreteness to what can too often prove a vague topic that is subject to contradictory theories and assumptions.
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