Academic Curriculum
The advocates of Academic Curriculum believe that every academic discipline has a particular structure and curriculum should develop in students understanding of basic principles of that structure. By adopting that structure, the students would go more deeply into the knowledge, create more ideas, and validate their ideas. The learning gained through this process would also enable the learners to make use of acquired knowledge in other contexts.
Bruner (1960) suggests that there may be following three kinds of structures in any discipline:
- Organizational structure
- Substantive structure
- Syntactical structure
The basic idea behind academic curriculum is to facilitate students in learning “how to learn?”. This curriculum tries to induce in students the methodology and procedure adopted by the specialists to discover new knowledge. This is done by introducing students to intellectually challenging situations to enable them understand and adopt the basic structure of the particular discipline.
