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 What is Curriculum Transformation?

The seeds of curriculum transformation were planted in the late 1960s, when scholars and teachers in higher education began to respond to the growing recognition that coverage of women--their experiences, perspectives, and diversity--was almost completely absent from the traditional curriculum. Surveys of academic disciplines in the liberal arts revealed, for example, that history textbooks devoted less than one percent of their coverage to women; that literature courses contained, on average, only eight percent women authors; that the most widely-used textbook in art history courses included not a single women artist; that generalizations about "human" behavior in psychology courses were based on research 90 percent of which had been done on males; that in sociology courses the study of women was more often than not confined to special units on the family or on minority groups; that even scientific procedures were often less objective than is commonly believed, given the sex and class of the researcher. Such discoveries raised grave questions about the validity of the version of human experience offered by the liberal arts, and therefore about the essential claim that a liberal arts education provides students with models of human experience and behavior that best equip them for living.

Since the late 1970s feminist teachers and scholars have been examining the traditional curriculum in higher education for gender and racial bias. As the new scholarship on women has become increasingly plentiful and available, faculty have been assisted in reviewing and discussing it by faculty development projects, usually called curriculum transformation projects. The goal of such projects is to encourage faculty to use more of the new scholarship on women in their traditional courses in order to achieve a more balanced curriculum. Most of these projects have focused on university courses but some have been devoted to secondary school curricula. Currently, we have identified over 470 curriculum transformation projects involving thousands of faculty and teachers.

In 1993, The National Center for Curriculum Transformation Resources on Women was funded by the Ford Foundation and later by FIPSE, U.S. Department of Education, to serve as a centralized source of information on curriculum transformation on women. Through its publication series Women in the Curriculum and its Web page, NCCTRW synthesizes and communicates information from projects and organizations throughout the U.S.

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