Curriculum Development in the Informing Sciences: Ecological Metaphor, Negotiation or Actor-Network?

Arthur Tatnall, Bill Davey
InSITE 2002  •  Volume 2  •  2002
Change in higher education information systems, and other informing science curricula is inevitable. This paper offers a brief consideration of three different models that can be used to describe how this change occurs. Most curriculum texts give prime consideration to approaches to curriculum change based on research, development and diffusion models, and the paper outlines some objections to the application of models of this type to describing how university curriculum in the informing sciences is built and rebuilt. It offers instead three alternate models; one based on an ecological metaphor, another on curriculum negotiations and the third on innovation translation from actor-network theory, to describe how this process occurs. This is a theoretical paper that does not advocate one model over another, and does not propose the use of any one of these models in devising a new curriculum. It is concerned only with obtaining a better understanding of how this complex process occurs.
Curriculum changes, information systems, informing science, innovation
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