Perspective! INCLUSIVITY OF THE CURRICULUM

RENELYN M. SAPON

The curriculum is always evolving and continually developing across the horizon of the human intellect as it promotes knowledge and skill acquisition to its clienteles-the child learners. Hence, for this matter, there is no truth that a curriculum is fixed much more permanent. It is completely varying in accordance with the context and contention, concepts and rationale, needs and wants and even the learning styles and preferences of the learning communities.

It is interesting to note that the curriculum is designed to accommodate all learning tendencies but never had an absolute plan on how to do such enormous aspirations. However resilient in mitigation, the curriculum seeks to know and understand the underlying factors on the continuing development of instructional requirements where a day’s teaching strategy may no longer be in an effective application comes another day. This is due to the rapidly emerging changes in both outlook and dispensation of the human intellect towards the acquisition of knowledge and skills. That is why the curriculum is primarily conceived and designed for flexible application but to accommodate all learning tendencies would require it to be regularly revised and improved. This is why the curriculum should be made inclusive regardless of applications so that potential learning requirements may be relatively contained in the process.

The idea of making the curriculum more adaptive to the needs of the learners rests on its fundamental design where the integration and incorporation of the latent potentialities, tendencies and interests are generally supported while the actual variations in learning styles and preferences are carefully aligned with the required competencies that have to be achieved in order to assure that the learning outcomes are suitable and in accordance to the generally applied principle of knowledge and skill acquisition. For instance, the curricular program in language education may require the mastery of the 5 distinct skills namely, listening, reading, writing, speaking and viewing in order to assimilate that the learner has now achieved the basic requirement for communication skills which are predominantly essential in learning the other core subjects across the curricular program. In the same manner by which the curricular program of Mathematics is employed in the aspect of inclusivity through the expansion of the numeracy requirement and the lateral adaptation of reliable remediation and enrichment intervention programs according to the learners’ capacity and interest such that it becomes essentially flexible and accommodating minus the usual fear of complications and the dilemma on numerals and equations.

When the curriculum is made entirely inclusive in terms of promoting the diversity of the learning processes, the essential understanding is clearly manifested on the perspective of productive learning experience due to the association of the primary tendencies of the learners that relatively build their own self-esteem and actualization. It is important that these primary tendencies are engaged on the different learning outlooks and packages for the learners to see their own significance in the actual acquisition of knowledge and skills for this will promotes a certain leverage and understanding that their own diversity and uniqueness in needs and performance are relevantly taken to full functioning. In doing so, efficient learning process is guaranteed and would sustain more the participatory tendencies of the learners and thus promoting a continuing learning acquisition over the times.

All it takes is the proper alignment of the curricular programs according to the manifested learning styles and preferences of the learners as referred to the actual contexts and contentions of their needs and wants in the light of acquiring the essential knowledge, skills and competencies.

-oOoThe author is Teacher III at Atlu Bola National High School