Top-down planning in school-based environmental education

Abstract

Because of its power to change individuals, by providing them with the 'valued' forms of knowledge, skills, values and attitudes, education has always been inseparably related to the progress of society. This implies that curriculum development is a crucial element in the promotion of change within society and by its very nature it is political. Doll (1974) refers to the curriculum designer as the "social engineer" and a "practical politician". The essential question to consider is who the curriculum designer is and what type of change is being proposed. Institutionalised education implies that decisions are taken about what children should learn. Curriculum planners making these decisions usually function within certain constraints imposed upon them by explicit legislation regarding education and/or the implicit value system of society and its educational tradition (Postlethwaite, 1977). To safeguard the transmission of these values and because of the bureaucratic structure of most formal educational institutions, curriculum development initiatives, in many countries, is characteristically a top-down approach. Traditionally, the most common model adopted in a top-down approach to curriculum development is the Research, Development and Diffusion (RD & D) Model (Havelock, 1978). The initial phase of the RD & D model involves identification of the educational problem and the initiation of research to. discover the best possible solution for it. The development of the innovation will then involve several tryouts and the evaluation of prototypes until finally a fully tested 'fool-proof programme is packaged and diffused into the user system. Such curriculum innovations reach schools mainly through two major routes (Bolam, 1978): the use of legislation controlling educational practice (a power-coercive strategy) and the use of resources supplying rational explanations about the proposed change (an empirical-rational strategy). Such resources may include inservice courses that familiarise the teachers with the innovation and provide them with the teaching materials required to implement it.