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The Curriculum Should Respond To Individual Needs And Support Particular ...


The curriculum should respond to individual needs and support particular aptitudes and talents. It should give each young person increasing opportunities for exercising responsible personal choice as they move through their school career. Once they have achieved suitable levels of attainment across a wide range of areas of learning the choice should become as open as possible. There should be safeguards to ensure that choices are soundly based and lead to successful outcomes. (A Curriculum for Excellence, 2004:14)
This personalisation has been achieved through a division of the design and technology curriculum in Scotland into the subcategories of craft and design, graphic communication, technology studies, product design and practical craft skills. Each of these compartmentalised topics enables the secondary sector student to acquire important enterprise skills that can be used in a business environment. For instance, graphic communications modules enable students to learn the art of digital photography while practical craft offers students the chance to learn more about important knowledge economy subjects such as engineering and electronics, furnishing them in the process with specific skill sets including using circuit layout diagrams and appropriate soldering techniques. This is not to state that the design and technology curriculum is becoming in any way fragmented. There is no inherent competitiveness between the various subcategories of the curriculum. Rather, each subcategory serves to augment the other so that the offshoots of the design and technology curriculum can be seen to dovetail one another to form a composite whole that covers the most important elements of technology and information studies for the present day economy.
As well as making sure that the design and technology curriculum manages to successfully walk the policy tightrope between tailoring a curriculum that meets all students' needs as well as formulating a curriculum that takes special, specific skills into account, the contemporary Scottish design and technology modules must likewise attempt to place the subject within the context of globalisation. This is a crucial feature with regards to the construction of the design and technology curriculum in the forthcoming years and decades whereby dramatic changes in society and the economy, as well as the political frameworks developed by governments in response to forces associated with globalisation, are likely to have a major impact on the reform of higher education systems internationally (Naidoo, 2000:25). The challenge ahead for Scotland and all regions of the UK is consequently to keep apace with these educational reforms taking place elsewhere in the world in order to continue to exchange information, initiatives and innovations online and via mobile telephony.


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