**2. Curriculum ideologies**

According to Schiro [20, 21], a curriculum ideology is a practical philosophy that influences a teacher's day-to-day behaviors toward curriculum issues. However, other scholars use the phrase curriculum orientation (e.g., [14, 19, 22, 23]). In the current study, I draw on Schiro's [20, 21] framework, in which the beliefs about the purpose of curriculum (education) are divided into four distinctive ideologies: the *scholar academic*, the *social efficiency*, the *learnercentered* (child study), and the *social reconstruction* ideology.

principals, and welfare staff, take part in teacher meetings, and so forth. The students also wrote reflective journals based on the coursework and field experiments. They were challenged to express their beliefs, attentions, and values on what had caught their attention relat-

Curriculum Ideologies Reflecting Pre-Service Teachers' Stances toward Inclusive Education

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.76326

41

The data from the "Teaching Practicum" were collected through the pre-service teachers' written narrative reflections, which allowed them to examine their lived experiences, biases, and assumptions about teaching. These two types of writings provided a window through which to understand the essence of the pre-service experience of teaching in inclusive settings. The data set thus comprised 230 reflective texts written during and after these two courses. Participants were numbered 1–115 with an acronym PRE, which refers to reflective

Through the content analysis (cf. [28]), it was possible to articulate variations of students' meaning making and varied ways of experiencing and interpreting their curriculum ideologies from the perspective of inclusive reform. The meaning unit was determined as either a complete description of an individual's lived experience or a brief notional statement called an "episode." Thereafter, I divided the episodes into topics, which consisted of repetitive reflections that emerged through several readings of the data. The topics were then classified and reduced into themes. Finally, six main themes emerged to describe the pre-service teachers' belief stances toward inclusive education (reported elsewhere). However, in this chapter, I do not follow the study analysis as such but rather examine the data from the perspective of thinking with theory [29], which method uses the data to think with, and use theory to think about the data. I interpreted the data through the lens of Schiro's [20, 21] framework by connecting the data and the curriculum ideologies to each other from the perspective of inclusive

The analysis of thinking with theory revealed two main tensions between pre-service teachers' curriculum ideologies [20], namely "knowledge versus experience" between the scholar academic and learner-centered ideology and the "adoption versus reconstruction" between the social efficiency and social reconstruction ideology. I picked crucial episodes that serve as examples of how the pre-service teachers interpreted the inclusive reform and what types of curriculum ideology they reflect. In this way, I was able to highlight the teachers' belief stances and prerequisites for working in inclusive settings and ways to interpret the NCC's

Although the basis of scholarly academic ideology rests on the belief that acquiring an understanding of academic knowledge involves learning the content knowledge and ways of thinking [20], the learner-centered ideology focus is solely on the student. The student's educational needs and interests are central to learning and must be incorporated in the learning experience. In the following, two pre-service teachers make meaning and reflect on their experiences of the teaching practicum. The former episode refers to a scholarly academic ide-

journals, and a different acronym PRAC, which refers to narrative reflections.

ing to the ongoing reform.

reform.

[9] inclusive agenda.

**4. Knowledge versus experience**

ology and the latter one to a learner-centered ideology:

The scholar academic ideology is concerned with maintaining "cultural literacy" by having students study the content and modes of inquiry of traditional academic subjects. The social efficiency ideology aims at efficiently carrying out a task for society, providing knowledge and skills that give students the ability to function in society. The learner-centered ideology places the student in the center of the educational endeavor and is concerned with helping each student grow into a unique individual who has a healthy self-concept. The social reconstruction ideology attempts to help students understand the crises facing society, develop a value stance toward those crises, and learn how to act to relieve the crises, thereby bringing into existence a better society [20, 21].

According to Schiro [20, 21], these ideologies are roughly parallel to the academic, vocational, personal, and social goals for education. Each curriculum ideology is more akin to a pedagogical subculture than to a goal; each has an impact on teachers' thinking about the nature of knowledge, the curriculum intent (aims, goals, and learning objectives), teaching strategies, learning, students, and evaluation methods (e.g., [19–21, 25, 26]). They also affect students because the underlying values and beliefs of each ideology not only influence what is taught but also how and why it is taught [20, 27]. It has also been shown that curriculum ideologies play an important role in the success of any reform movement [25].
