Course review
As you know, all IB courses go through a cycle and every 7-8 years or so, revisions (more or less radical) take place. Group 1 courses are all currently being reviewed and you can read about the outcomes of development meetings that have taken place to date on MyIB. Below you will find a summary of progress to date, as reported by the most recent curriculum review document.
Curriculum review report: a summary
A review of all Group 1 courses began in 2019. This was characterised initially by research into the way the (then new) course had been received and resulted in the first curriculum review, which was published in 2024. In 2023 changes were made to paper 2 assessment criteria.
Since that time, a ‘development phase’ has been undertaken in the Literature course and at some point in the future we will see the introduction of an ‘implementation phase’ when a new iteration will be introduced. Currently, Literature is ahead of Language and Literature and Literature and Performance, both of which are sill in the research phase. This means that the new literature course will almost certainly arrive sooner than the other two.
Findings from the research phase for our literature course indicated that ‘no aspect of the existing curriculum or assessment model needed urgent attention or immediate repair, nor did the structure of the course need major adjustment’. This means that the new literature course will seemingly not deviate much from the one with which we are now very familiar.
As things stand currently, proposed revisions to the current course that have emerged from Development meetings 1-3 affect the following areas:
Group Aims
- Revision to the ‘shared set of group aims’
- Revision to the literature course aims, including statements that relate specifically to AI: ‘A key aim of the literature course is to empower learners to recognise that is uniquely human in acts of reading, writing and interpretation’
Areas of exploration and core concepts
- Retain the Areas of exploration ‘but present them more flexibly’, for example in less prescriptive ways, and to rephrase the questions associated with them
- Replace ‘Intertextuality’ with ‘Frameworks and connections’
- Attend to implications of AI by introducing notions of self-awareness and reflectivity in and through the study of literary works. In addition, ‘encourage learners to see themselves as passive recipients of meaning, but as active co-constructors…’
- Rethink Concepts by focusing more directly on ones that are distinctly literary. Possibilities include interpretation; production; global experience; intertextuality; forms
Course requirements
- Retain categories that help teachers select a range of texts, for example in terms of period, place, form, genre, but relax some of the current requirements so that teachers (and students) have more agency in the choices they make. Perhaps provide a checklist for teachers to ensure diversity instead of mandating numbers of texts from periods; places; genre
- Rename prescribed reading list e.g. ‘suggested list of authors’
- Broaden the concept of a ‘work’ to include something more than authorship and include collection of shorter texts as an additional definition of ‘work’
- Works in translation should be decoupled from a notion of inherent cultural representation associated with language; emphasis should be placed on the concept of translation as a ‘transcultural and interpretive act’
- Provide a ‘reflective tool’ to help teachers determine whether a work is of sufficient ‘literary merit’
Papers 1 and 2
- No significant change other than more clarity about compare and contrast in Paper 2
Internal Assessment
- ‘Global issue’ will become ‘Global topic’
- No requirement to use a work in translation
- Students will be asked to select two literary forms, whether in Language A or in translation
- Remove fields of inquiry
- Time requirement will be 10-12 minutes for the presentation and 3-5 minutes for questions.
- Teacher questions will focus on the students’ process of deriving the global topic and their study of course concepts/areas of exploration
- Outline used by the student in the exam will be standardised
- Students will be permitted to bring in a select number of quotations to provide support for their points
Higher Level Essay
- Authentic student engagement should be evidenced. This could mean the introduction of a criterion which assesses students’ decision making in implementing feedback. This criterion would replace criterion D (language).
- Teachers will engage in classroom activities that focus attention on:
- Developing a line of inquiry
- Supervised writing or alternative activity that allows ‘the students’ articulation of ideas and voice to be demonstrated’
- Feedback: student-teacher meetings on the line of inquiry or draft, as well as written feedback on draft
- Students will record activities undertaken in class that have had the most impact on their learning, as well as provide reflective comment on how they chose to integrate feedback provided during the process
- Supervised writing, the record and reflection on progress form and the final essay will be submitted to the IB