The labyrinth of the curriculum concept

Abstract

Any scientific approach must start with the explanation of the basic concepts. Our communication has in view the real labyrinth of the curriculum concept which is a key-concept of the contemporary pedagogy (J.C. van Bruggen, 1992) used more and more in the contemporary pedagogic debates as well as in the educational practices. The concept comes from the Latin word curriculum (singular) and curricula (plural) which means race and run. The curriculum concept in the educational context was first used by the teacher Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) in his work Professio Regia (1576). The meaning in the educational field was changed in the second half of the 16th century: the term appears for the first time in the documents of Leiden University (1582) and in the ones of Glasgow University (1633). The term was consecrated mainly due to the American pedagogy in the first half of the 20th century: John Dewey (1902), John Franklin Bobbitt (1918), Ralph W. Tyler (1949) and Hilda Taba (1962). The francophone literature was initially reticent to the curriculum term and preferred the syntagm plan d`études), it was the sociologist Jean-Claude Forquin (1989) the one who imposed the term in French. The contemporary literature faces a new conceptualization of the curriculum concept (Jonnaert, Ph., 2015) and we shall insist on it within our communication). The systemic paradigm of the curriculum (S. Rassekh and Ge. Văideanu, 1987; John P. Miller, 1988; M. Stanciu, 1999; Mușata Bocoș, 2007) answers the conceptual demands as well as the methodological ones