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Figure 3.5: Lily
from “Whose IDeA is this?” Facilitating Professional Reflection and Communication Through The IAL Design
Figure 3.5: Lily.
Referring to Lily’s curriculum profile (see Figure 3.5), the ticks represent the profile for teacher training curriculum and the crosses represent the profile for special education. It would appear that, other than ‘goal’, the remaining parameters are very similar, if not the same. The reason for the difference in ‘goal’ is that children with special needs will need to focus on acquiring key skills and so this essentially is about building up competencies, whereas special needs teacher education involves both teacher competencies and capabilities, such as being creative, being able to solve problems and having patience. Lily’s colleague, Pam, also from the special education school, reflected similar sentiments. She commented:
… this [IDeA Model] goes very nice with adult education but I can also apply it for special education.
Chris’s experience with developing CET non-WSQ Specialist Diploma courses for adult trainers and PET courses for students in a polytechnic showed similarities in curriculum philosophy with some variation in responses for ‘focus’ and ‘assessment’ parameters. See Figure 3.6 ( crosses for PET and ticks for CET). Like Chris’s Specialist Diploma programme, the teacher training programmes that both Lily and Pam referred to are also non-WSQ programmes. The contrast would be obvious if we compared WSQ CET curricula with PET curricula. For example, Ginny put it very clearly when she attributed the differences to the curriculum model adopted (curriculum as a product or a process). She said:
… the curriculum frameworks that are currently, something we reference, or we are required to reference from, as an early childhood fraternity. The frameworks say that curriculum is process. [Is that] okay? This is the curriculum for young children. But, the way we write the WSQ kind of work is, curriculum is a product. So, how do we gel the both?
