What effect does an academic's concept of curriculum have on their engagement with its design and development?

The undergraduate curriculum is one of the most important products higher education institutions offer their stakeholders ¹ as it both determines and drives outcomes. Despite this, the most notable outcome of a “review of the literature on curriculum in higher education in the UK, the USA and Australia … [is that there] is the dearth of writing on the subject” ². That literature which does address higher education curricula assumes a common understanding of the term curriculum and targets curriculum related issues such as 'inclusive curriculum', 'learner-centered curriculum', internationalization of the curriculum or it focuses on the design of individual courses - that is, single units of study ². Accepting that an important aspect of our role as academics is “not to impart knowledge, but to design learning environments that support knowledge acquisition” ³, what impact might a higher education academic's understanding of the term 'curriculum' have upon the process and activities they undertake when designing and developing courses and programs of study? This paper reports on the initial findings of an on-going study whose aim is to tease apart the factors that affect an individual academic's engagement with curriculum design and development. So far, data has been collected from 22 academics involved in teaching computer science, software engineering, engineering, and information systems courses at three Australian universities. The constructivist grounded theory methodology proposed by Charmaz ⁴ was selected for this project. Accordingly, data collection and analysis are being conducted concurrently, with the outcome of earlier data analysis informing subsequent data collection. Initial data analysis indicates that academics focus their attention on course level curriculum rather than program level; don't frequently discuss ideas and proposed changes with peers; that curriculum design and development at individual course level is essentially a solitary activity; and that academics don't have a coherent view of the whole degree program. These findings are in accord with those reported in 1997 by Stark, Lowther, Sharp and Arnold ⁵. Furthermore, the diverse understanding of just what curriculum is caused confusion during focus group interviews. In addition to the findings noted above, participants described the goals and outcomes of a curriculum as a specification or set of requirements, and noted that the written, official or “espoused curriculum” was a complex, “designed object” whose internal relationships were hard to understand and visualize. Participants also identified the notion of “drift”, where a curriculum moves out of alignment as teaching staff, responsible for individual courses are replaced, and/or small but frequent change to course goals and outcomes are implemented without reference to degree outcomes. In this paper program refers to a complete, integrated course of study leading to the award of a degree qualification. Course refers to a single unit of study, sometimes called a unit, subject or module. Students take a number of courses each semester. A program is constructed from many courses. Academic refers to a teacher at a higher education institution, sometimes called faculty.