Leading curriculum renewal in a faculty of education : a story from within

Abstract

This article investigates the process of curriculum renewal in a faculty of education. I report on my own experiences as the initiator of the change to the Bachelor of Education curriculum. When colleges of education were incorporated into higher education institutions, some faculties of education were relocated to these campuses. This move brought to the fore the debate of whether it is better for a faculty of education itself to offer all the content in an education degree, or to outsource subject specialisations apart from Education to discipline-specific departments in other faculties. The existing curricula and the recommendations of an internal audit were interrogated as a first step towards change. The idea was to strengthen the subject specialisation knowledge of the students through the involvement of the discipline-specific or specialist faculties and simultaneously include a social justice framework for the delivery of the programmes. Design research methodology was used to analyse the process of curriculum renewal in the Faculty of Education. In order to analyse the existing curriculum, a process of document review was used. The final curriculum was negotiated with staff members and its compliance with the Higher Education Qualifications Framework is provided.