| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 課程與教學研究所 === 95 === A Case Study of a Elementary Integrated Activities Textbook Development Decision-Making Process
Abstract
The purpose of this research was to study the process of a team of editors developing a series of textbooks. This study was on a case of elementary Integrated Activities textbook development for Taiwan’s Grade 1-9 Integrated Curriculum, and this study was particularly focus on how the decision-making process was affected by the team members’ curriculum beliefs and their knowledge/power. The methodology employed in this study was divided into three phases. First, essays and articles related to power structure of textbook development process are reviewed. Then, a case study on a textbook development decision-making process is conducted through participant observation, interviews and document analysis method. Finally, this research is concluded with suggestions for other textbook development teams.
The purposes of this study were:
1. To study the textbook development decision-making process of Boyia Publish’s Elementary Integrated Activities.
2. To study the dissention among the members of Boyia’s Elementary Integrated Activities textbook development team evolved from team members’ curriculum beliefs and knowledge/power during the process of the curriculum development.
3. To conclude this study and to provide the results as the reference for future curriculum improvement and better textbook development decision making process.
Major Findings of this study:
1. The motivation for the participation of the members of the editorial team was to challenge their own professional growth and to prove their ability to develop a curriculum. The team was organized into cooperative levels with their own responsibilities. The operation of the team was base on the professional decisions made through group discussions.
2. The curriculum beliefs of the members of the team included considerations such as students’ leaning experiences and needs, the essence of Integrated Activities, the appropriateness to the contemporary social settings with a global view and multicultural awareness, user-friendliness, concerns to character forming, evaluation and seeking outside professional supports.
3. During the textbook development, one of the tasks was to complete the competency benchmarks. The curriculum guidelines as well as the choosing and the organizing of the teaching materials were all developed through professional dialogues with considerations of students’ learning experiences, interests, urban-rural differences, character forming and the approval of the textbook review committee. Page layout was to communicate the teaching activities and to clarity of the text arrangement.
4. The difficulties that the team had experienced included: The team members were mostly from the background of student counseling, inconsistency of individual group working progress, absence of meeting, different stands of consultants and the team coordinator, professional manners of individual team members, lack of art editing background knowledge.
5. Knowledge/power dissension evolved during textbook development included the failure to transform editing process due to the inflexible editing procedures. The major factor that influence the textbook development is the pressure came from the textbook review committee, especially caused by the different interpretations to the same competency benchmarks and the professional credibility of the textbook review committee members. The other major factor is the feedbacks from market appraisal that compromised team members’ curriculum beliefs.
6. The confabulation strategies used for the decision making process of the team included valuing the opinions of the team members with more editing experiences, willingness to face challenge, cooperation and collaboration, using the feedbacks from the teaching sites and from the market.
Base on the findings above, this study made some suggestions for the curriculum policy makers, teaching material review structure, editors of other textbook editors and writers.
Keywords: integrated activities, textbook, the decision-making for the curriculum development
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