Curriculum and Pedagogy in Language Education
A course to deepen, integrate and extend upon the understandings of developing curricular materials.
Curricular Materials Development (CMD) is a multi-disciplinary domain that requires a nuanced understanding of how societal aspirations, disciplinary priorities, developmental considerations and contextual constraints interact to shape curricular decisions in a given domain. It involves a deep understanding of both curriculum theory and domain knowledge, along with supporting knowledge bases related to aims of education, child development and learning, and the like.
Students from the MA Education programme are well positioned to contribute to curriculum material development efforts during their careers. All students in the programme have completed the core Curriculum Studies course along with three other courses in the Curriculum and Pedagogy-Language stream of the programmes — Introduction to Language and Literature Education, Curriculum and Pedagogy in Language and Literature and Advanced Language and Literature Pedagogy. However, none of these courses has been designed to specifically consider issues related to curricular materials development. Curricular materials arguably play an important role in educational settings, as well as in reform efforts. It is important that students be provided with a systematic opportunity to engage with issues related to CMD.
The Curricular Materials Development in Language and Literature Education course
aims to deepen, integrate and extend upon the understandings built in the earlier courses in the context of developing curricular materials. The course will be conducted over the 12 weeks that students will spend at the Azim Premji Field Institutes during the third semester of their programme. This provides an opportunity to integrate classroom discussions with field realities related to curricular materials, their development, use and evaluation as a part of the course. The course is not specific to any language. Many principles of language teaching and learning are common across languages, and students will have the freedom to develop materials as per field necessities and their own capabilities. They will be provided with language-specific guidance on how to do that successfully.