Curriculum: top down or grassroots?

Where do curriculum ideas come from and how do we stop telling the story of education that ignores educators?
For a course on learner-centered curriculum, I was given the assignment of visualizing the transformation of curriculum in America from Dewey to today's learner-centeredness. The problem I discovered was that the story of curriculum is often told in the monolithic top-down approach of most textbooks. Devoid of real social movement context and the actual reality of teachers in the classroom, what I had to work with was the history of ideas about education from philosophers.- white male philosophers. So I put women back in the story and in particular, women of color. This is a starting point and certainly not exhaustive but I'm sharing as an exercise in validation.
The evolution of curriculum from the Progressive Era to learner-centered approaches in 2020 is a story of expanding access to education and the ways education theorists contracted or broadened their focus on the learner as more voices demanded to be heard over time. This visual is grounded in the context of each time period and how it defined and redefined knowledge as the focus of education. The center of the graphic shows learner-centered ideas morphing over time, splintering, dividing, and reshaping. Finally, influenced by critical and feminist pedagogy, this visual includes a few of the voices left out of curriculum history, which focuses almost exclusively on white male perspectives for over 100 years.
Beginning with Dewey’s theories in 1917, progressive education introduced the idea that knowledge is made, not found (Pouwels & Biesta, 2017). Today Weimer describes a learner-centered approach that incorporates engagement, empowerment, shared control, collaboration, skill focus, and reflection (2013). Each element of this learner-centered approach connects to developments in curriculum theory. The progressive ideas about education are central to engagement, as theorists like Dewey believed that all children were curious, creative, and anxious to learn (Glatthorn et al., 2019). 
In the 1940s, functionalists saw the purpose of learning as preparation for successful adult life. Learner-centered approaches redefined the narrow mid-twentieth century definition of success to empowerment and self-direction. Other curriculum evolution elements influenced current ideas of empowerment, including Piaget’s understanding of developmental stages. In the 1950s, the application of developmentalism was conformity; however, in 2020, shared control of classroom responsibility and decision-making connects to developmentalism’s foundational ideas. In the shift from teacher-centered to learner-centered practices, the individual’s developing sense of self and responsibility plays an important role. The color of the visual changes from blue to green reflects a pivotal shift and new ideas.
The impact of postmodernism is evident in many elements of politics, society, and culture in the 1960s and 1970s, but in curriculum theory, it is most apparent in a splintering of ideas. Two ideas central to learner-centered practice that emerge from the 1960s are multiculturalism and critical thinking. Both are still present in our current focus on collaboration in classrooms. While many ideas are of value, and students should hope to acquire many perspectives, thinking critically and weighing evidence is also an essential trait of a modern learner. From the 1960s onward, access to education continued to expand for many groups as Brown v. Board of Education eventually led to schools’ desegregation. More women and people of color attended college. From the 1980s through today, the curriculum was influenced by many stakeholders seeking accountability, standards, improvement, specialization, and personalization. The learner-centered focus on skills is a by-product of decades-long focus on standards and the proposed testing to answer the accountability question. 
The final trend in this visual focuses on rethinking. In 2014 more children in the US educational system were non-white than white (Glatthorn et al., 2019). A focus on equity, global thinking, and twenty-first-century skills brings the evolution of the progressive emphasis on children as the center of learning into our globalized world. Learner-centered practice focuses on reflection. As students evaluate their learning, they also are challenged to connect to the world around them. The curriculum must evolve to allow this kind of reflection, and those influencing curriculum can do so by reflecting on ideas of equity and global responsibility. To do so, this visual introduces a final element, the voices of those left out.
Learner-centered theory connections
Education leaders cannot develop curriculum in a vacuum. This visual attempts to show the evolution of learner-centered thinking in the context of evolving theoretical frameworks. Context is essential to the understanding of the curriculum. However, Glatthorn excludes all but two women and all people of color. The four women included in pink at the top of the visual are just a fraction of the education influencers who have helped create the learner-centered practices we strive for today. These voices are included as an attempt to incorporate critical and feminist pedagogy. Critical pedagogy is focused on the transformative power of education to create a world that is more just by empowering students and teachers to transform (Agnello, 2016). Montessori believed education’s purpose is to help children discover their potential rather than simply impart knowledge (Lillard, 2019). Her theories fit well with Dewey’s and carried progressive child-centered approaches into the twenty-first century. The other women included in this visual helped create the conditions for inclusive classrooms. Cooper fought for her education and developed new pathways to self-determination for black women as a teacher and principal (Sule, 2015).  Bethune pushed for civil rights and women’s rights, representing both critical pedagogy ideas of overturning oppression and feminist pedagogy. hooks carries this tradition into the twenty-first century. Her theories expand the concept of engagement and self-directed learning by overturning power structures and calling for joy and pleasure in learning (Stanger, 2018).

Agnello, M. (2016). Enactivating Radical Love: Joe L. Kincheloe’s 10 Precepts of Teachers as Researchers. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 7(3), 68–78.


Glatthorn, A., Boschee, F., Whitehead, B. M., & Boschee, B. F. (2019). Curriculum leadership: Strategies for development and implementation. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.

Lillard, A.  (2019). Shunned and Admired: Montessori, Self-Determination, and a Case for Radical School Reform. Educational Psychology Review, 31(4), 939–965.

Pouwels, J., & Biesta, G. (2017). With Socrates on Your Heels and Descartes in Your Hand: On the Notion of Conflict in John Dewey’s “Democracy and Education.” Education Sciences, 7.
Stanger, C. (2018). From Critical Education to An Embodied Pedagogy of Hope: Seeking a Liberatory Praxis with Black, Working Class Girls in the Neoliberal 16-19 College. Studies in Philosophy & Education, 37(1), 47–63.

Sulé, V.  (2015). Intellectual Activism: The Praxis of Dr. Anna Julia Cooper as a Blueprint for Equity-Based Pedagogy. Feminist Teacher, 23(3), 211–229.

Weimer, M. (2013). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.



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