Research On Lawrences Stenhouse’s Thoughts Of Humanities Curriculum Reform

Lawrence Stenhouse was a world reputed curriculum researcher in England. During all his life, he had been committed to realize his educational idea of emancipating students and teachers. He advocated the idea of ’a process model’of curriculum development, led the outstanding ’The Humanities Curriculum Project’, pushed the movement of teachers as researchers’, thus left great intellectual property for curriculum reform, particularly for the theory and practice of the humanities curriculum reform.Stenhouse saw symbolic interactionism as his theoretical basis of humanities curriculum reform. He constructed a set of views on the classroom culture, classroom standards, the curriculum and teaching methods of general and specialized education as his general position and analytical framework. Stenhouse treated the culture as a medium of communicative interaction, then education had much to do with ensuring that individual and culture meet in a favourable way to creativeness, curriculum became the cultural choices of teachers. Applying this theory into practice, Stenhouse thought ’standards’, located in the culture as social norms of quality and quantity of schoolwork, was much more important than ’objectives’as underpinning the assessment of the outcomes and the process of education. Classroom culture was a kind of working group culture under the leadership of teacher, and the dynamics of classroom culture was the allocating of common standards and the sanctions. As the leader of classroom, the teacher has to handle the problem of teacher authority through research and creative approach.As for the curriculum and teaching of general education and specialized education, they should not be the disciplined general education based on the elite class in essence, but an general education towards the majority of the students--a kind of education concerned with the social communication and general experience of human life, and a kind of teaching method towards progressive orientation aligned with this kind of curriculum which could meet the curriculum demands of the majority of the students.In fact, the humanities curriculum reform was designed to solve the problem of the gap between two kinds of culture——the disciplined general education provided by the school and the classroom culture consisted of students’experience, and the aim of the reform was the emancipation of students.In Stenhouse’s mind, the’humanities’ represented a kind of emancipation route, had strong potentials of reform. The cultural mission and practical vision of the humanities curriculum reform was to develop a kind of curriculum based on the interests of the majority of ordinary students, improve the quality of students’ thoughts, and carry out the inquiry teaching towards a kind of understanding of the controversial issues.In practice, Stenhouse chose the ideal of experimental development, he severely criticized the objectives model of curriculum development, and based on this he proposed the’a process model’of curriculum development. According to the selection principle of worthwhile content and the structure of worthwhile content, ’principle of procedure’ in teaching, returning to the two possibilities rejected by Taylor, they developed the curriculum of controversial issues, and ’The Humanities Curriculum Porject’ was the typical example of the ’a process model’ of curriculum development. In accordance with this, in the Humanities Curriculum Project Stenhouse and his colleagues developed a set of inquiry teaching strategy consisted of discussion procedural disciplined by evidence. In this kind of inquiry teaching, the teacher was required to undertake the role of ’neutral chairman’, and the teacher who was quite qualified for the work should change a lot in cognition and skill, in hence, in the Humanities Curriculum Project, the research group offered the teachers help in many different forms, such as training and participation in research, etc.In the later deepening and reflection of the humanities curriculum reform, Stenhouse found that the general educational theory derived from the educational research under the Psychological-statistics paradigm couldnot guide the improvement of teacher’s educational behavior. Based on this, he constructed a kind of action research in which the teacher was at the center of research, the aim of which was the formation of a kind of pedagogy, and pushed the movement of ’the teachers as researchers’. Then this kind of action research realized the emancipation of teacher.Stenhouse’s thoughts on the reform of humanities curriculum was an experimental reply to the curriculum problem of Secondary modern schools faced in the 1960s of England. In practice, it not only formed ’a process model’ of curriculum development, but also gave rise to and pushed the ’educational action research movement’,’the teachers as researchers movement’ in England and the whole world, thus made great contribution to the development of curriculum theory research and curriculum reform practice which had great implications and practical significance for today. Of course, Stenhouse’s thoughts on the reform of humanities curriculum still had historical limitations.