1. National Curriculum Framework 2005
Dr. Sukhwinder Singh Cheema
Assistant Professor in Teaching of Economics

2. The Mandate
Charter of NCERT Put special emphasis for designing curriculum.
NCERT expected to review school curriculum as a regular activity ensuring the highest standards of rigour
National Policy on Education, 1986 assigns a special role to NCERT in preparing and promoting a National Curriculum Framework.
NCERT is the National Council for educational research and training set up in the 1960s

3. NCF structures National Steering Committee(NSC) set up
NSC comprised 35 members including scholars, principals and teachers, NGO representatives and NCERT faculty
NSC supported by 21 National Focus Groups to prepare well researched Position Papers
NFGs chaired by renowned scholars and practitioners

4. Problem of Curriculum Load
Joyless learning
Examination system
Textbook as the ‘Truth’
Structure of syllabus
Language Textbooks
Starting Early

5. NEED OF NCF
(a) the school system is characterized by an inflexibility that makes it resistant to change;
(b) learning has become an isolated activity, which does not encourage children to link knowledge with their lives in any organic or vital way;
(c) schools promote a regime of thought that discourages creative thinking and insights;
(d) what is presented and transmitted in the name of learning in schools bypasses vital dimensions of the human capacity to create new knowledge;
(e) the “future” of the child has taken centre stage to the near exclusion of the child's" present”, which is detrimental to the well-being of the child as well as the society and the nation.

6. National Focus Groups Curricular Areas: Systemic Reform:
Science, Mathematics, Indian Languages, English, Social Sciences, Art, Dance, Theatre and Music, Physical Education & Health
Systemic Reform:
Aims of Education, Systemic Reform for Curricular Change, Curriculum, syllabus and textbooks, Teacher Education for curriculum renewal, Examination reforms, Work & Education, Educational Technology, Heritage Crafts
National Concerns
Problems of SC/ST children, Gender, Problems of children with special needs, Peace Education

7. Wide ranging deliberations
Country wide consultations/ interactions with classroom practitioners, scholars of the country
Rural teachers
State Governments/ Local Self Governments
Voluntary Agencies
Principals of private schools
Unprecedented media debates
Advertisements inviting suggestions placed in 28 national and regional dailies
Over 2000 responses received

8. NCF DRAFTING COMMITTEE

9. PUBLIC OPINION

10. A mother’s response…
“Our syllabus gets more massive and moves beyond the teaching capacity of the teachers so they rush through the contents with tedious methodology.
Students cannot meet the attention span requirement in the classrooms and either fail at comprehension or blank out into daydreaming.
Newer topics of many different subjects are covered even before the previous ones have been chewed over.
The burden of the syllabus is then passed on to the parents or tuition classes.
Little children burdened with loads of ‘education’ on their shoulders trip from school to tuition classes, bypassing childhood.
A section of students study harder and harder to beat each other to the top slot. Majority of the students are hounded by parents and teachers to study harder and become stressed, some requiring even clinical treatment.”

11. Learning and knowledge
AREAS
Perspectives
Learning and knowledge
Curricular areas, school stages and assessment
School and classroom environment
Systemic reform
Tagore

12. Perspectives
Provides the historical backdrop; recalls NPE statement on curricular framework NPE
Revolves around the question of curriculum load on children
Information often confused for knowledge.
Tendency to teach everything arises from our lack of faith in children’s creative instincts.
Demand for inclusion of new topics/subjects results in disjointed syllabi; encyclopaedic textbooks, and traumatic exams.

13. Perspectives Proposes guiding principles for curriculum development
Connecting knowledge to life outside the school
Ensuring that learning shifts away from rote methods
Enriching curriculum so that it goes beyond textbooks
Making examinations flexible

14. Perspectives
Describes the social context of education - hierarchies of caste, economic status, gender relations that influence access and participation.
Cautions against pressures to commodify schools and application of market related concepts to schools and school quality
Discusses the aims of education
Building commitment to democratic values of equality, justice, freedom, concern for others’ well being, secularism and respect for human dignity and rights.

15. Learning
and
Knowledge

16. Learning and Knowledge
Focuses on the child as an active learner
Primacy to children’s experiences, their voices and their participation
Need for adults to change their perception of children as passive receivers of knowledge
Children can be active participants in the construction of knowledge
The school should recognize the innate ability of each child to construct his/her own knowledge, and the fact that every child comes to school with a fund of pre-knowledge.

17. Learning and Knowledge
Therefore children must be encouraged to ask questions, relate what they are learning in schools to things happening outside and answer in their own words rather than by memorizing.
Recognizes the need for developing an enabling and non-threatening environment
Emphasizes that gender, caste, class, religion and minority status should not constrain participation in experiences provided in school

18. Learning and Knowledge
Highlights the value of interaction with:
environment,
peers,
older people to enhance learning;
Learning tasks must be designed to enable children to seek out knowledge from sites other than textbooks.
Need therefore to move away from rigid lesson planning to planning and designing activities that challenge children to think and try out what they are learning.

19. Curricular areas, school stages and assessment

20. Curricular Areas, School Stages and Assessment
Recommends significant changes in Language, Maths, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences
Overall view to reduce stress, make education more relevant, meaningful.

21. Curricular Areas, School Stages and Assessment
Language:
Makes renewed attempt to implement 3-language formula
Emphasis on home language as medium of instruction
Curriculum should promote multi-lingual proficiency; can happen only if learning builds a sound language pedagogy of the mother tongue.
Focus on language as an integral part of every subject: reading, writing, listening and speaking contribute to child’s progress in all curricular areas and must be the basis for curriculum planning.

22. Curricular Areas, School Stages and Assessment
Mathematics
Succeeding in Maths should be seen as the right of every child
A majority of children have a sense of fear and failure of Maths: they give up early.
Curriculum is disappointing to this non-participating majority, but also to talented minority – it offers them no challenges.
Textbooks are replete with problems, exercises and methods of evaluation which are repetitive and mechanical
Focus on child’s ability to think and reason
Visualize and handle abstractions
Formulate and solve problems

23. Science
Should be recast to enable children to examine and analyze everyday experiences
Environment Education should become part of every subject – thru’ wide range of activities involving outdoor project work

24. Curricular Areas, School Stages and Assessment
Social Sciences
Recognizes disciplinary markers so that content is not eroded, but also emphasizes integration of themes, such as water water
Recommends paradigm shift to study social sciences from the perspective of marginalized groups
Gender justice and sensitivity to issues of tribal and socially deprived groups, and minority sensibilities must inform all sectors of social sciences.

25. Curricular Areas, School Stages and Assessment
Draws attention to four other areas:
Art Education
Covers four major spheres of music, dance, visual arts and theatre.
Focus on interactive approaches, not instruction – because goal is to promote aesthetic awareness and enable children to express themselves in different forms
Health and Physical Education
Success in school depends on nutrition and well planned physical activities.

26. Curricular Areas, School Stages and Assessment
Education for Peace
As a precondition for national development in view of growing tendency towards intolerance and violence.
Work and Education
Work alone can create a social temper.
Work should be infused in all subjects from primary stage upwards
Agencies offering work opportunities outside the school should be formally recognised.

27. School and classroom environment

28. School and classroom environment
Critical pre-requisites for improved performance
Availability of minimum infrastructure and material facilities
Support for planning a flexible daily schedule.
Focus on nurturing an enabling environment
Revisits traditional notions of discipline
Discusses need for providing space to parents and community

29. School and classroom environment
Discusses other learning sites and resources
Texts & books
Libraries, tools and laboratories
Media and ICT
Addresses the need for plurality of material and teacher autonomy/ professional independence to use such material.

30. Systemic reform

31. Systemic Reform
Covers need for academic planning for monitoring quality
Reaffirms faith in local self government
Proposes systematic activity mapping of functions appropriate at relevant levels of local self government
Simultaneously ensuring financial autonomy on the basis of the funds-must-follow-functions principle.

32. Systemic Reform
Teacher education should focus on developing professional identity of the teacher
Examination reforms to reduce psychological stress, particularly on children in class X and XII
Recommends changing the typology of questions so that reasoning and creative abilities replace rote learning

34. Future Steps
Development of syllabi and textbooks based on the following considerations:
Appropriateness of topics and themes for relevant stages of children’s development
Continuity from one level to the next
Pervasive resonance of the values enshrined in the Constitution of India in the organisation of knowledge in all subjects
Inter-disciplinary and thematic linkages between topics listed for different school subjects, which fall under discrete disciplinary areas

35. Future Steps
Linkages between school knowledge in different subjects and children’s everyday experiences
Infusion of environment related knowledge and concern in all subjects and at all levels
Sensitivity to gender, caste and class parity, peace, health and needs of children with disabilities
Integration of work related attitudes and values in every subject and at all levels
Need to nurture aesthetic sensibility and values

36. Future Steps
Linkage between school and college syllabi; avoid overlapping
Using the potential of media and new information technology in all subjects
Encouraging flexibility and creativity in all areas of knowledge and its construction by children

37. Learning and Knowledge
Highlights the value of interaction with:
environment,
peers,
older people to enhance learning; grandpa
Learning tasks must be designed to enable children to seek out knowledge from sites other than textbooks.
Need therefore to move away from the ‘Herbartian’ lesson plan to preparing plans and activities that challenge children to think and try out what they are learning.