The Introduction to Curriculum course came at the prefect time for me as a teacher designing a school initiated credit (SIC). We learned that in order to design curriculum, educators need to take into account the needs of many different stakeholders. Looking at how a teacher reads a curriculum document relative to a student, parent, school board member, or a politician, was illustrative of just how difficult creating an “ideal” shared body of knowledge and/or outcomes really is.
Understanding that curriculum isn’t just jotting down some “stuff” that is vaguely related and that students should learn was quite helpful to me when it came time to create a personal finance SIC that was accepted and taught this past school year. I think that in some cases the process of actually creating my own curriculum gave me more respect for the curriculums that are currently out there. On the other hand, it also served to illustrate just how out of date and out of touch certain curriculums are as well.
Overall I found the process of creating a curriculum that I’ve since passed on to others very rewarding. I chose this curriculum was my artefact from the course because it represents the theory-based concepts I engaged with throughout Introduction to Curriculum, with the practical need I saw for personal finance concepts to be taught in schools. It is interesting to note that while I chose to go through the administrative stream during my graduate studies that I feel that I may have more of a future in the creation and dissemination of business curriculum than I do in administration.