Exploring lived curriculum in a course in educational technology

Curriculum studies in primary and secondary education has a long history and tradition and it is quite normal to have a wide and diverse literature and various thinking camps in curriculum field. There is a very different story in curriculum debates in further and higher education. As a fundamental component of higher education, curricula have always received a fair amount of attention in practice. Postsecondary institutions have been forced to deal with curricula in order to survive. That is to say what is really missing is theorizing and conceptualizing the curriculum decision making in this sub specialist area of HE. For this reason, this paper has focused on designing a model for study of curriculum in higher education based on phenomenological approach that can be called Experiential Curriculum model (what student experience or what actually they learn based on their unique backgrounds, abilities, interests and so on). Despite a few related works, little effort has been done about “theorizing” and explanation of lived curriculum. Lived or experiential curriculum has not, to date; been fully explored, unraveled, and interrogated. In addition, the relative lack of theorizing within lived curriculum has produced, perhaps, a false impression of consensus, ignoring the conflicts and contested nature embedded within the variety of ways we live in the curriculum. The paper will discuss the components based on a case study at Shahid Beheshti university, Iran.