PROPOSING A FLEXIBLE CURRICULUM FOR TEACHING NATURAL HEALTH PRODUCTS

(NHP) AT DIFFERENT ACADEMIC LEVELSBENJAMIN TAK-YUEN CHAN 1 AND TERENCE CHI WAI LEE 2

Open University of Hong Kong, LiPACE1 and University of Hong Kong, SPACE2

A review of the literature on food and nutrition education shows that there is scanty discussion of the ways to approach teaching of NHP or one of its variants such as health food, functional food, nutraceuticals and dietary supplements. With increasing use of NHP in the population, teaching it to medical, allied health and life science students at different academic levels becomes more relevant and is clearly in need of a sound framework. While different instructors have their ways of structuring the subject matter in the syllabus for addressing outcomes, content and assessment, a truly versatile and learner-focused curriculum would need to take into account how to accommodate learners of various levels of academic preparation and yet be able to deliver the necessary knowledge about NHP that students are expected to know. This challenge appears most daunting for the university continuing education sector that provides programmes from bespoke training courses to Masters level module.

The challenges of teaching NHP

Can there be a core curriculum framework for NHP?

The answer is yes. From our experience of teaching and course development, we have applied the notion of a core curriculum framework from which we readily derive courses for company training of 10-12 hours, a 36-hour course taught to Higher Diploma, and 20-hour module taught to Masters students. The core curriculum framework is not a prescription of how many teaching or learning hours for any topic nor is it about a mechanistic application of outcomes-based approach that tries to give assurance of what learners are able to know, do, or feel upon learning a topic. Rather, it is about interpreting the structure of the discipline (in this case, the new discipline of NHP), so that even complex concepts can be readily taught to learners at fundamental levels and from which they can proceed to grasp the connectivity and structure of the whole body of knowledge of the discipline. In simple terms, the expectation for a learner to know the structure of the discipline of NHP will be the just the same for someone taking a short course as compared to someone taking a course at Masters level. The difference merely lies in the depth and breadth of understanding the different topics.

Fig. 1 A core curriculum framework for NHP

Spiral curriculum

What we are suggesting here is not something new but is a borrowing from the notion of “spiral curriculum”. The spiral curriculum is proposed by the living education psychologist Jerome Bruner whose suggestion is to move from simple ideas by teaching them intuitively, then revisiting them later on in more formal ways (as learners are more prepared) so that mastery is gained in a way resembling an ascending spiral staircase with higher level of operational proficiency in using those knowledge and in finding the connectivity of concepts.

Jerome Bruner (1915- )

The spiral curriculum can be exemplified by the teaching of math and science subjects in primary years where learning is cumulative and based on materials taught repeatedly but in greater depths. As learning progresses into secondary years, teaching of subjects no longer follows this approach, for example, algebra is taught before trigonometry, which in turn is taught before calculus. This assumption that has informed mainstream education in secondary school and universities takes for granted the suitability of everyone to learn the same thing at the same time because the time has come for them to learn it.

Fig. 3 The spiral curriculum

How is it applied?

The crucial factor in curriculum adaptation is that the same structure of the discipline has to be presented to learners. In a short training course for general sales personnel, the contents of the background knowledge base and advanced knowledge base have to be taught both intuitively and concisely, while the products usage knowledge base can be arrived at by a categorization of the company’s range of products. For example, the background knowledge of free radical scavenging will need to be taught in order to understand the product function of antiaging and the product category of antioxidants. However, this need not be taught using an elaboration of chemical phenomenon taking place at molecular level which would baffle ordinary sales personnel with no science background, but should instead be taught metaphorically using simple pictorial representations where appropriate. The same approach can be taken in the teaching of product quality where elementary concepts of product standards precedes the understanding of methods of analysis, certification systems, safety issues and ingredient sources that will be taught in increasing difficulty as courses progress from sub-degree to undergraduate, and then postgraduate levels. The spiral design is akin to a model that has a common starting point which swirls around the different breadth and depth of themes (or topics) to eventually terminate at a final finish line.

Fig. 4 The spiral design

What about teaching and assessment?

Implementing the core curriculum framework for NHP requires two constant reminders. Firstly, the need to teach the common knowledge base at all course levels; and secondly, the same concept has to be revisited over again but each time the subject matter as presented would build on some previous fundamental understanding of the same. For this purpose, the lecture notes and powerpoints naturally carry forward some old materials for revision sake but new materials of increasing difficulty are introduced. Ordinary pedagogical considerations apply in the actual teaching delivery such that a variation of learning activities and assessment methods is used to reduce the number of didactic teacher-led sessions at higher academic levels. For example, at the Masters level, product usage knowledge base is delegated to students for self-learning and requires them to do individual class presentations and discussions with submission of written assignments. In contrast, classroom teaching of product usage knowledge base is greatest at the Higher Diploma level supported by in-class practical learning tasks set as group activities. Given the practical application of the subject matter, assessment through portfolio constitutes a major part of the assessment component irrespective of whether the course is taught at Higher Diploma or Masters level.

ConclusionAs the spiral design reveals, learners will have to come across all the themes during their study of a course at any particular level but their degree of interaction with each theme will be quite different each time leading to variations in learning experience both within the learner and across learners. In the age of outcome-based teaching and learning (OBTL), it would be difficult for educators to understand why it is alright for some learners not to be able to understand the subject matter taught. The spiral curriculum does not rest on knowing or understanding discrete and disconnected topics which current OBTL assumes to be the case. Our application of the spiral curriculum nevertheless does not suggest it is impossible to reconcile the spiral curriculum with OBTL. It would require replacing the attainment of specific learning outcomes with the firm grasp of the structure of the discipline, which is by itself one big and sole learning outcome.