Developmental vs. Academic Curriculum Organization
Every curriculum articulates what children should learn from both theoretical and organizational perspectives. In early childhood, two different approaches predominate. In some curricula, goals, concepts and activities are designed and organized in terms of academic content areas such as math, science, social studies, reading, and writing. In other curricula, these three elements are expressed according to growth and learning across developmental domainscognitive, social/emotional, physical, and creative.
This might be confusing, as many of you are probably wondering about the “right way” to think about curriculum for young children. In later chapters, we will examine both types of curriculum design more closely, but either can be effective and developmentally appropriate as long as:
- The curriculum is grounded in sound principles about how young children think, learn, and interact.
- Designated materials and activities reflect the interests and abilities of children.
- Goals and outcomes promote learning that is integrated, meaningful, and relevant.
- Assessment methods and tools are used authentically to accurately represent what children know and can do. (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009)
From time to time, early childhood educators have been pressured to diverge from these principles. By the mid-1980s, for example, after the publication of A Nation at Risk, concerns about public schools resulted in a “back to basics” movement, which promoted basic skills and a unilateral focus on reading and math. Some felt that this approach led to the exclusion of other areas of the curriculum. Pressure to implement what early childhood educators called “pushing down” the curriculum and wide-scale standardized testing of young children was intense (Katz, 1999; Willis, 1993).
Push-down advocates assumed that long-term achievement could be improved by implementing a strict academically oriented curriculum that focused earlier on reading, writing, and mathematics. They also assumed that strategies used with older childrensuch as whole-group instruction, rote memorization, and paper-and-pencil activities, rather than a play-oriented curriculum, could be used with 4-year-olds. Thus the incentive for a massive collaborative response on behalf of the early childhood field was born.