Curriculum: Foundations, Principles, and Issues

by Allan C. Ornstein, Francis P. Hunkins

New teachers and school administrators are often faced with the challenge of conceptualizing, developing, and evaluating curriculum. They need solid coverage of the philosophical, historical, psychological, and social foundations of curriculum. This book provides just that and more. Throughout this book, readers are engaged in considering the tension between postmodern thinking and modern thinking and how they are impacting curriculum deliberation, development, and implementation. Topics the field of curriculum, social and psychological foundations, development, design, evaluation, and much more. New and practicing teachers and school administrators.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Teaching

416 pages, Hardcover

Published October 28, 1997

Reviews

[Josiah DeGraaf · Rating 1 out of 5]

Possibly the worst textbook I've ever read. The book is simultaneously way too broad and way too narrow in the topics it chooses: it's attempting to both be entirely comprehensive and pretty deep, and the result is a confusing jumble of ideas that are loosely tied together. There is a virtue in simplicity, and that's something this book lost. It attempted to thoroughly dissect the topic of curriculum. And I guess it succeeded at dissected it. But being able to see all the individual body parts of a frog on the table in front of you tells you nothing about what a living frog actually looks like. This book essentially did the same thing with curriculum. While it may technically cover everything, it didn't cover it in a way that I felt helped me in creating my own curriculum. Very tedious, very unhelpful. Would not recommend.

Rating: 1 Star (Extremely Poor).

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for my grad school class and it was super helpful in defining curriculum and how it has evolved over the years. I learned a lot!

[Julyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is recommended for educators when doing research.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another school book.

Again, I discussed this so much for my grad classes, I'm too fatigued to write a review. Apologies.

I'm betting that if you're reading it, you're reading it for the same reasons.

Favorite part: Looking at the philosophies and how they influenced curriculum. (I was surprised the the author more or less lumped them together though. For instance, one may not hold an existential or progressive world view - but may take some of the precepts into their classroom. I.e. Existentialists reject Absolute Truth. A teacher may believe in Absolute Truth in a moral sense, but that doesn't mean that in the classroom she belittles others, or devalues the input of her students. It's apples to oranges...)

Anyway. Go me. Go all y'all. Good luck on your studies.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book from cover to cover for my first class on curriculum design. While the book doesn't really get into curricula itself, it does provide a lot of background knowledge of the philosophies people bring to the planning table, histories behind the evolution of state standards, how curricular change can be implemented (and why it is often opposed), methods for evaluating curricula, and how schools are organized in other countries and their teachers prepared for teaching. For a textbook it wasn't an overwhelming read.

[Ellen Deckinga · Rating 3 out of 5]

As most of the other reviewers stated, I read this book for a grad school class. There is some great information about the history, philosophy, and development of curriculum. You have to sort through the author's bias to pick out the information. The author's make no real assertions throughout the book and instead leave things ambiguous for the reader. It has affirmed that my uneducated gut instincts about curriculum design were appropriate for the needs I was meeting.

[Carrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It had a lot of great information in it. However, I hated the formatting of the book. I wondered as I was reading it if the publisher was trying to save ink. Instead of making vocabulary and important terms, etc. in bold print, they were typed in italics. This made it very hard to find information quickly. Overall the formatting of the book was poor, that is just one example.

[Shawn Veltheim]

Helped me pass my test for my teacher's license. Fairly informative, but there's a lot of bias mucking up the pages, made it difficult to dig out the facts I was looking for. I thought that the newer, more "radical" ideas had a lot more print dedicated to them than was merited.

[Nik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had to read this for a class I took this summer.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was actually interesting. Surprisingly informative book, but not one I would pick up on my own. Maybe that's the reason it cost $177.00.

[Whitney Evans · Rating 3 out of 5]

The authors have some clear bias. I ended my class feeling less sure of what curriculum actually is than before I started, but the book has some great information and gave me a lot to think about!

[Bridget · Rating 2 out of 5]

Textbook writers are not my fav. Good info but poor layout

[Megan Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this for class, it offers a good overview of the different curriculum foundations. The writing style for a textbook was not my favorite.