Conceptions of the Curriculum: teachers and 'truth'

This article draws its inspiration from the three socio-epistemological theories of phenomenology, contextualism and traditional epistemology and their abrasive interrelation. From these foundations, theoretical framework is devised as a basis for an exposition and interpretation of empirical work undertaken in four contrasting school contexts. The aim of the research was firstly to look for similarities between teacher' conceptions of the curriculum and secondly to provide evidence which could be used as a basis for judging to what extent these similarities were constrained by teachers' conceptions of 'truth'. The paper discusses teachers' responses to three questions from an open-ended questionnaire, these requested views on how far curriculum content was considered to be related (a) to individual pupils, (b) to social requirements and (c) to 'truth'. The discussion of each question resolves itself into a number of issues connected connected with these three themes. The article is predominantly interpretative but a short appendix displays a more rigorous analysis of the distribution of the responses across the four schools. Finally, although the paper is concerned with opinions about curricula rather than with actual curricula transactions, my hope is that awareness of teachers' ideas may provide indicators for curricular realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]