Research On Roles Of The Students In School-based Curriculum Development

Faced with the obstacles in implementing the Classic Recitation as a school-based curriculum, this paper studies mainly on roles of students, which are important factors involved in the process, and attempts to identify the role-deviation problems. Moreover, this paper attempts to find out the reasons for deviation and then reconstruct proper roles for students by means of analyzing the school-based curriculum development system.In the first part, after exploring various roles of students in educational and philosophical theories in chronological order, this paper highlights three roles of students, that is, followers, participants, and multi-roles, and regards changes in views of knowledge and students as the reason for the changes of students’ roles. Postmodern curriculum and complexity theory stress on possibilities of students’ multiple roles, which mean that students are not only successors of social experiences, tellers of their personal experiences, but also receivers, senders, tellers, interpreters and even creators of those experiences, while academic failure makes students become alternatives and marginal men, providing reference for reconstructing proper roles for students in educational practice.In the case of Classic Recitation as a school-based curriculum, there are several typical roles of students in the process of curriculum development:followers who passively submit to teacher authority and course scheduling; resisters who abhor or have no interests in the contents regardless of whether they have difficulties in study or not; lofty sustainers who are the superintendents at the bottom of the curriculum development system as well; hidden participants who are willing to take part in the process, but their voices are unheard. All the roles above have deviation problems, consequently hindering the development of both the school-based curriculum and students.The development of school-based curriculum is a dynamic and systematic process, and there are respective deviation problems of students’roles dwelling in each step of the process. Thus this paper analyzes the goal-making, curriculum-designing, implementing, and evaluation of the curriculum. And students are found passively involved in the process. To redress the deviation of students’roles and make students actively take part in the process, this paper tries to provide suggestions concerning the curriculum-planning, implementing and evaluation.