2.2 Chapter 9 education of immigration students in the community  (Page 4/9)

The curricular design from the educative administrations and the teaching institutions can and must:

1. Adapt the general missions to the particular developmental stage, sequencing them by cycles and courses,

2. Adapt the content blocks, sequencing them by cycles and courses,

3. Provide methodological options for the different stages and curricular areas,

4. Decide the evaluation model of the processes of education and learning, and how that institutional evaluation that will be carried out,

5. Define an organizational model for centers practicing designed curricular projects.

In virtue of the curricular autonomy that each center has assigned, it is possible to educate while including interculturalism as a cross-sectional factor in all the curricular elements, whose application must be facilitated by the organizational model that is established for that center. Both decisions –curricular and organizational– will have to be coherent to be viable.

Curriculum elements

I want to focus upon, and synthesize each one of the curricular elements. I will elaborate, mainly, on the two I consider most fundamental: the methodology and evaluation, with special reference to its role in education.      

Objectives and contents

The adjustment and sequencing of general objectives regarding stages of development and content areas favor regulation of the learning process by setting stage specific goals. Learning centers may not eliminate any basic objective expressed in the catalogue, but they may flexibly modify it, making the adaptation and coherent sequence of objectives possible. Based on goal objectives, suitable contents will be selected. These objectives and contents strive to allow individual development of each student according to their personal characteristics, thereby offering them the best educative attention possible. Objectives of intercultural character must also be devised, otherwise that expected intercultural education will remain as a declaration of good intentions without practical results. The determination of objectives and the selection of contents condition the teaching staff’s curricular development.

Methodological strategies

When referring to methodology, the center must consider all options since it is not obligatory to follow a particular methodological model. The only criterion for the model is that it must harmonize with the expected objectives and contents that are being worked.

Methodological change becomes essential when there is a specific reason for that call for change. For example, student participation is on the increase, according to many professors. This makes a varied methodology in which the professor’s expertise is combined with the individual activity and teamwork of the student ideal, as is the use of varied resources or didactic materials which consider different learning styles, rates, levels, capacities, different cultures, and social situations. By using varied methodological styles and materials, curricular modifications can be facilitated. Our main principle must be to regard differences, of all types, as enriching for all. We must use diversity as our basis to the varied methods applied in classrooms.