Sharing and building the higher education curriculum: course design in an open and collegial context

This paper addresses the characteristics of the teaching practices that are shaped by the educational beliefs and values that academics bring to curriculum design in higher education (HE). It presents the results of a case study of a 2012 curriculum-sharing project, involving ten UK universities, in which academics from the social science disciplines, Sociology, Anthropology, and Politics, came together to exchange course designs and materials. Drawing on realist epistemology, the study applies Bernstein’s (2000) pedagogic device to examine the basis of recontextualisation and the underlying epistemic insights evident when HE courses are made ready to be shared and used by others. This is made possible by enacting Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2014). A conceptual model of curriculum making is developed that can reveal how academics interpret and respond to the ‘opening-up’ process of reproducing the curriculum, and how their curriculum-making work is legitimated. Expertise in designing and approving the curriculum, as the basis of curricular authority, is seen to be discipline-based. Importantly, this analysis makes visible the factors necessary in order for academics to realise new forms of the curriculum.