Evaluation of Humanistic Curriculum Within “Accepted” Movie

Abstract

Humanism is a perspective which centers upon human interests and values. It asks learners what they want to be and how they want to be. Recently there have been dominant traditional and technological perspectives to education and this situation causes some problems because these perspectives service to society's expectations, not learners’ expectations. Humanistic curriculum might be a kind of antidote for technological and traditional perspectives. These perspectives mostly focus on cognitive development while humanistic perspective focuses on affective development. The aim of this study is to evaluate humanistic perspective and curriculum within the “Accepted” movie because the students are asked what they want to learn and how they want to learn in the movie. The methodology of this research is a case study within qualitative approach. The data are collected by discourse analysis. At the end of the study, three themes are defined in the movie: Materialistic expectations and disappointments; humanistic curriculum development; traditional curriculum vs humanistic curriculum. There is no pure humanistic curriculum so far therefore it is not known yet the outputs of it in the real world. New educational programmes based on humanistic curriculum might be developed and applied. There might be new studies to combine traditional curriculum and humanistic curriculum.