A critical realist exploratory study into the dominant approaches of curriculum developers at research-intensive universities in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Expectations around teaching, learning, and curriculum, have shifted alongside the massification of higher education, creating the need for specialized roles, such as curriculum developers, to effectively address those expectations. This research investigates the expanding yet understudied role of curriculum development as a specialized function within Canadian research-intensive universities. Although curriculum developers now play a prominent part in shaping academic programs, little is known about the nature of their work. Using a critical realist lens, this qualitative study explores why certain approaches dominate curriculum developers’ practice. Margaret Archer’s analytical dualism enables an examination of the relationship between curriculum developers and the structural and cultural conditions shaping their roles, while Basil Bernstein’s sociology of education provides tools to analyze the types of knowledge developers draw upon and how this knowledge is recontextualized in practice. Sixteen curriculum developers who work in the teaching and learning centres at research-intensive universities in Canada were interviewed for this study. The findings indicate that the rationale behind curriculum developers’ approach to their work is linked to ‘market relevance’ based on their professional role rather than theoretical knowledge from academic disciplines, placing the field within Bernstein’s conceptualization of the generic mode. The recontextualizing principle governing how curriculum developers select knowledge in their work with departments is based on the notion of ‘quality’, tied to developers’ morally grounded commitment to student learning. The notion of quality manifests both as a structural emergent property through quality assurance and governance policies in universities and as a cultural emergent property through dominant discourses related to the concept of alignment in higher education broadly. The findings indicate that curriculum developers are socialized into their roles and are influenced by these dominant discourses through interactions with peers and colleagues, as well as through other avenues such as scholarly work and conferences. This study highlights both theoretical and practical implications for the field of curriculum development, arguing that practitioners need greater awareness of the conceptual foundations and contextual conditions shaping their work to strengthen their agency and decision-making.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".