On The Teacher As The Curriculum

The study of the relationship between curriculum and teacher has undergone a metamorphosis from the teacher-proof orientation to that of teachers as interveners. Curriculum theory, born in the beginning of20th century, and influenced by Scientific rationalism, focused at this stage on the curriculum with teacher-proof as its main concern, which is curriculum development-oriented. This paradigm is basically aimed to set up goals according to the social needs, and teachers are required to deliver the courses in accordance with the fixed objectives. Consequently, teachers are deprived of initiations and controlled by the objectives. This kind of curriculum paradigm foreclosing teachers was criticized in1970s by Joseph J. Schwab, a curriculum scientist, who maintained that teachers should be the initiator, the organic component of a curriculum, taking the role as the subject instead of being isolated. Hence, he put forward the idea that "the teacher is the curriculum" in his own teaching practice. In the late1970s, Jerome S. Bruner, the representative of structuralism, also the advocate of the scientific curriculum theory, realized teachers’influence on students and admitted the absurdity of offering the ideally designed courses to students without any intervention of teachers. In1990s, Sato Manabu, the renowned Japanese educationalist argued that teachers are supposed to take the role of a mediator instead of a mere intermediator, and that students are influenced by their teachers’ethical and moral value, experiential and practical knowledge. According to Zhong Qiquan, a Chinese scholar, the teacher is the curriculum in the sense that teachers are in need to implement the well-designed curriculum in classroom teaching practice. With these in mind, the present researcher aims to make a theoretical analysis of this issue.The present research is to approach the issue from three aspects:first, to summarize the features of the "teacher-proof orientation" by examining the traditional curriculum theories; second, to streamline the theories of reconceptualization with an aim to analyzing the openness, plurality and contextualization of the contemporary studies on curriculum; third, to give reasons in favor of the theory taking teacher as curriculum through relative theoretical explanations from phenomenology, tacit knowledge theory and hermeneutics.The dissertation begins with an analysis of the curriculum origin, the evolution of the curriculum theory after its emergence, with a view to clarifying the idea that curriculum and teacher are compatible before the birth of the traditional curriculum theory in the industrialized world, that the curriculum study isolates teachers from curriculum in the industrialized world. Based on the above analysis, the dissertation comes up with an idea that the traditional curriculum system in the current background is closed, controlled and teacher-proof. Chapter2offers a sketch of the theoretical and the current social backgrounds of the traditional curriculum theory, which are mainly represented by the rationalistic criticism of science and technology, behaviorist psychology and industrialized society. Chapter3summarizes the major features of the curriculum designed according to the teacher-proof theory. Chapter4aims to criticize the teacher-proof theory in order to establish a solid foundation on which the researcher’s view is to be presented by way of analyzing the criticisms of the traditional teacher-proof theory by curriculum theorists and by American traditional reconceptualization. Chapter5analyzes some new ideas that come with the criticisms of the traditional curriculum theories by reconceptualization advocates. These ideas include the Currere theory, the feminist curriculum theory and the critical curriculum theory, which offer an understanding of curriculum from the perspectives of openness, plurality and contextualization held by the reconceptualization theory. Thus, such an understanding will veto the teacher-proof theory, making teacher as curriculum possible and acceptable. The last two chapters focus on the elucidation of the necessity of teacher as curriculum using phenomenology, tacit knowledge theory and hermeneutics in order to completely subvert the traditional curriculum theory that teachers are distinctly isolated from curriculum. The present researcher thus comes up with the idea that curriculum should be context-dependent, positional, regional and individualistic, and teachers’ethics, experiential and practical knowledge should also be an indispensible part of curriculum.