Curriculum making as social practice: complex webs of enactment (original) (raw)
Related papers
Conclusions: Patterns and Trends in Curriculum Making in Europe
Curriculum Making in Europe: Policy and Practice within and Across Diverse Contexts
This chapter provides a summary and a concluding discussion on the main findings from the different cases and chapters throughout this volume. The chapter revisits the approach on curriculum making as non-linear and as framed around a conceptualisation of interrelated sites of activity-supra, macro, meso, micro and nano-presented in the introduction. A central conclusion of this book is that the meso site of activity stands out as critical for current developments within curriculum making, both in terms of a transformed role for the nation state in macro curriculum making, as well as implications of policy flows and processes from the supra site of activity. Based on our observations, we suggest an elaborated model for understanding curriculum making, with special attention to the significance of meso curriculum making and teacher agency. In the final part of the conclusions, we argue that there are a number of lessons to be learned from curriculum making in the European context. In line with the significance of meso curriculum making observed throughout the volume, we emphasize the importance of middle ground and mobility, the necessity of participatory curriculum making, and that systems of accountability need to be based on trust. We also underline the importance of a delicate balance concerning regulation-providing support, guidance and steering-together with a critical awareness of destructive as well as progressive forces for maintaining and providing the agency of the educational system for good curriculum making.
Curriculum Making: A conceptual framing
2021
This chapter provides an introduction to the European case study chapters in this volume on curriculum making. The chapter explores different conceptions of curriculum and curriculum making. It offers a critique of existing thinking about curriculum making as something that occurs withinreified levels within an educational system. Such thinking often construes curriculum making as occurring through linear and hierarchical chains of command from policy to practice. Drawing upon previous conceptualizations of curriculum making, the chapter develops a new approach to understanding curriculum making. This is a heuristic rather than a normative framing; it is essentially non-linear, framed around the concept of intertwined sites of activity – supra, macro, meso, micro and nano – within complex systems, with curriculum making framed as types of activity rather than institutional functions.
2013
The widespread government involvement in curriculum reform has made curriculum policy a popular research topic. The traditional understanding of curriculum policy refers to policy in text that displays the formal intent or authorative statement of government in “contextuality” (Lasswell, 1951). However, curriculum policy is never a static or linear snapshot of the context; it is practically a distributed social constructive process of sense-making and re-making with the changing context. Curriculum policy is continuously reconstructed and evolved as it transfers among contextualized localities (Ball, 2006), differentiated groups and individuals in action. The focus of the article is to reveal the tension and complexity of curriculum policy in action with the sense of time and space. The analysis takes the 10+ years’ curriculum policy change in Chinese context as an exemplar. The first clue of the analysis is to examine the travels of curriculum policy in China from central governmen...
Subjects, not subjects: Curriculum pathways, pedagogies, and practices in the United Kingdom
INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK
To follow a curriculum is to be inducted into a social order. From this perspective, curriculum practice has the intention to foster social identities. The visible curriculum and the hidden curriculum are rendered as inseparable. This paper discusses curriculum research in the United Kingdom, adopting the framework sketched above. The paper pays attention to the pre-figurative relationship that exists between curriculum and social structure. It assumes that courses of schooling foreshadow specific forms of social order, and, in turn, it recognizes that curriculum change has a functional relationship to changes in the social order. It also recognizes, however, that this functional relationship is problematic: curricula, like schooling, may work to maintain the social order, or they may operate to change the social order. But, the paper asks, "What is the social order and how does it operate at local, regional, national, European and global levels?" To explore these questions, the paper focuses on four areas of curriculum and practice: (1) the association of curriculum with social order; (2) the growth of curriculum federalism in the United Kingdom under the shadow of the fragile hegemony of the super-national state; (3) the advancement of new pedagogic identities as a means of injecting social justice into curriculum practice; and (4) the centralist promulgation of a
A Discourse on Curriculum Theory
Drawing a comparison between philosophers and artists Bertrand Russell (1950: 159) asserts that teachers likewise may only perform properly through internal creative impulse rather than being fettered by external authority. Whether this position rings true is likely a matter of perspective on the nature of education. Regardless, structured curriculum endures and continues to be the driving force that underpins the delivery of education in the UK. However, what makes an educational curriculum is a subject of ongoing debate. Indeed, Tummons (2009: 4) quite rightly contends that the word curriculum itself is too vague, broad and far reaching to be useful in any genuinely helpful way. Therefore, in this essay I will explore the two predominant models of curriculum planning with the view of analysing their efficacy and suitability in enabling truly educational curriculum. This will require theoretical and ideological consideration of what education is to mean in our democratic society. From the outset I assert the product model to be deficient in enabling a truly educational curriculum concluding the process model most accurately reflects this concept. I will discuss the curriculum as it is today and conclude that whilst guised as learner-centred and adhering to holistic process principles it is in fact an overtly objective, product based curriculum. Further to this I will discuss the possible impact of using such a model of curriculum in the contemporary FE sector.
Critical curriculum studies and the concrete problems of curriculum policy and practice
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2018
In this article, I share a number of thoughts and concerns about the current and future status of a field in which I have been a participant for five decades. I know that many others share these worries as well. Speaking honestly, I am deeply concerned that too much of the field of curriculum has lost its way. Too much of it is characterized by a condition of historical amnesia. It has too often forgotten the key questions about what and whose knowledge should be official. It has become lost in postmodern abstractions and deconstructive despair. It is hermetic in too many ways and has in the process lost its ability to speak clearly about some major problems facing schools, teachers, students and communities. With neoliberal, neoconservative, authoritarian populist, and new managerial forces increasingly occupying the space of real policies and practices, we have little voice in the public debates over the realities of schooling and the decisions of curriculum policies and practices. The field of education deserves more.
1994
This book contains summaries of the presentations delivered at the first European Conference on Curriculum. Sponsored by the European Curriculum Researchers Network (ECUNET), the conference aimed to offer researchers an opportunity to present their findings and discuss them with research colleagues and other professionals interested in curriculum improvement. The book contains summaries from two sessions that review curriculum research and development in the following countries-England, Germany, The Netherlands, Israel, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Russia. Summaries of presentations on the following themes are also provided: curriculum implementation; mother-tongue curriculum; curriculum assessment and student outcomes; curriculum innovation and textbook development; curriculum development in different contexts; curriculum evaluation; quality assurance in assessment of student outcomes; curriculum policy; curriculum improvement and teacher development; and science and mathematics teacher professional development in Southern Africa. (LMI)
Debate and critique in curriculum studies: new directions?
Curriculum Journal, 2019
At the recent European Conference for Education Research in Hamburg (3-6 September), a double symposium took place, primarily focussing on the place of powerful knowledge in the curriculum. The symposium was hosted by EERA Network 3 Curriculum Innovation and chaired by Jim Hordern, one of the contributors to the recent special issue of this journal (issue 30[2]), 'After the knowledge turn? Politics and pedagogy'. While the symposium was first proposed in relation to the papers in the special issue, its scope was more ambitious, also involving new and highly prominent contributors such as Gert Biesta and Zongyi Deng, who had not published in the original special issue. The sessions were packed to the rafters, with people being turned away at the door, which is indicative of the high levels of interest currently generated in the curriculum field, and which bodes well for the future of curriculum studies. Zongyi Deng, drawing upon a recently published paper on the state of the field (Deng, 2018), offered a powerful critique of current trajectories in curriculum studies. Deng was especially critical of North American reconceptualism, drawing analytical tools from Schwab's (1969) seminal critique (through a medical framework) of the field as "moribund", a term the latter used to denote the 'symptoms' of the field as he saw it in late 1960s North America. In Deng's view, the current state of play manifests many of the six 'flights' or 'symptoms' identified by Schwab at that time, particularly: a flight of the field, as curriculum scholars have become marginalised by policymakers, and as research on curriculum practice has increasingly become undertaken by specialists in other fields such as assessment; a flight upwards, as curriculum scholars increasingly engage with 'exotic' and 'fashionable' discourses such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and so forth' (Deng, 2018, p.697); and a flight to the sides, as scholars have explicitly distanced themselves from the worlds of practice found in schools and other educational institutions. Deng offered three sets of solutions to this situation: 1] curriculum theory should be focussed on advancing the field, and should thus be a 'normative undertaking which needs to be animated and informed by a vision of what education should be' (Deng, 2018, p.701, emph. in original); 2] curriculum theory must be concerned with, and have a strong relationship with educational practice, 'and the inner work of schooling that are defined by specific curriculum content or material, specific students, and specific teachers within a specific instructional context' (Deng, 2018, p.702, emph. in original); and 3] there should be critical, creative and eclectic use of theory, as different theories offer different perspectives on the field, and 'combin[ing] various theories [.] form[s] a more appropriate" whole" for application to issues and problems concerning practice and the inner work of schooling' (Deng, 2018, p.705). We note here that Deng's work will soon become more prominent in the UK, as he will shortly take up a Chair in Curriculum and Pedagogy at UCL/IoE. Of course, Deng's ideas are subject to critique and contestation themselves, and we offer them here to enable lively debate on curricular issues, thus further exemplifying and perhaps expanding what we have called a renaissance for the field. As we have stated in