From product to process in curriculum planning: a view from Britain

I visited California in 1989 in order to meet Mary Poplin at the Claremont Graduate School. I had been deeply impressed by her two articles that had appeared the previous year in the Journal of Learning Disabilities (Poplin, 1988a, 1988b). It is always such a pleasure to meet someone of like mind. (The meeting seemed particularly poignant in light of the fact that at that time, back in Britain, the National Curriculum was rearing its ugly head.) The work of Lous Heshusius (1982, 1989, 1991, 1992) and Richard Iano (1986, 1989, 1990) has also given me much encouragement. All three writers rightly reject "reductionism" in special education and support an alternative world view: holism. I am very concerned about the way that Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) dominate special education in both North America and Britain. The purposes of this article are to sketch an account of the rise of IEPs in Britain, to expose some problems presented by the behavioral objectives model and its associated IEPs, to introduce an alternative model--the process model--and to show the shift from a product to a process approach in curriculum planning.