kennedy


 

 
 
 
 
Publication Review 

 
 

Kerry J Kennedy 
University College of Southern Queensland 

 
 

C. McBeath. Curriculum Decision Making in TAFE. 2nd Edition. Perth: 
Australian Society for Educational Technology WA Chapter, 1991, 118pp. 
http://education.curtin.edu.au/pubs/cdmt/home.htm 
[now at http://www.clare-mcbeath.id.au/cdmt/home.html] 

 
It is good to see a second edition of this book for it has a great deal to teach 
curriculum developers. Among the more important lessons are: 
 
• Curriculum development is a humanistic rather than a technical 

enterprise. No single model can remove the importance of judgement 
and professional insight when it comes to making key curriculum 
development decisions.  

• Curriculum development decisions take place in a social, political and 
economic context. This context may very often determine both the 
process and the product of curriculum development.  

• Curriculum development decisions are more often than not decisions 
about shared values. 

 
These lessons are not simply a priori assertions by the author. They 
emerge from an empirical study of curriculum development teams in 
action. They are grounded in the reality of what curriculum developers 
actually do and therefore they deserve some attention. 
 
Curriculum development, as advocated by the TAFE sector, seems largely 
to be technical/rationalist in its orientation. Such approaches assume that 
simple prescriptions can capture the essence of the curriculum 
development process. A good example is the Instructional Systems Model 
which provide thirteen steps that take developers from the initial analysis 



Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 1991, 7(2) 165 

through to the validation phase. McBeath's study demonstrates, however, 
that in the real world developers adopt the parts of the model that suit 
them, they reject those parts that do not and they improvise when their 
own intuition tells them to do so. 
 

The methods of science are too restrictive to assist us in 
the understanding of education 

 
It may be, as Elliot Eisner proposed, that we need to look at educational 
phenomena from an artistic rather than a scientific perspective. The 
methods of science are too restrictive to assist us in the understanding of 
education. They impose restrictions unnecessary to human thinking and 
are designed simply to impose order on an essentially chaotic world. An 
artistic perspective, on the other hand, illuminates and takes seriously the 
unpredictable and the unforeseen. The artist portrays the world through 
his/ her own value system and through unique insights into the human 
condition. McBeath's description of what curriculum developers actually 
do lends weight to Eisner's position. The curriculum developer as artist 
seems like a theme that might be worth exploring in subsequent work of 
this nature. 
 
I hope that there will be more empirically based curriculum research such 
as McBeath has produced here. As educators, we need to turn from a priori 
theory building. We need to focus our attention on what Shulman has 
called 'the wisdom of the practice'. In this way, theory will emerge from 
practice, grounded in reality and capable of being tested again in other 
contexts. McBeath has demonstrated the worthwhileness of such an 
approach and it is to be hoped that she continues such efforts. 
 

Please cite as: Kennedy, K. J. (1991). Review of "Curriculum Decision 
Making in TAFE", 2nd Edition. Australian Journal of Educational Technology, 
7(2), 164-165. http://www.ascilite.org.au/ajet/ajet7/kennedy.html