Curriculum Matters 2 : 2006

This year, New Zealand’s Ministry of Education published a draft curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2006), as part of the consultative process associated with the development of the next school curriculum. Whether this document is a major perturbation to our curriculum thinking remains to be seen, but I assume that most paradigm shifts cause some unrest. The publication seems somewhat premature—as some sections had not been completed—which suggests that the political agenda may have… Read more

This article argues the view that curriculum policy is an educative resource for teachers, and that this view imposes certain design considerations on policy. Foremost among these is the need to signal shifts in meaning, in ways that enable teachers to better understand what the reform is requiring of them, and how this is different from existing practice. Past curriculum designs in New Zealand social studies are analysed, and patterns of signalling shifts in curriculum intention are… Read more

This paper challenges the belief that methods of teaching reading are the answer to raising age cohort standards of achievement, and that literacy, in the form of reading and writing, is based on spoken language. It is argued that documents, advising how to raise standards of literacy, have overlooked the way in which education systems work, and their relationship to large-scale testing, and have not considered methods which use real-life writing to establish literacy in young school… Read more

This article explores and critiques the different ways in which the concept of “key competencies” has been understood and represented in the curriculum. It is argued that if competencies are to go beyond simply reinforcing the curriculum status quo, the role they play in the curriculum needs to be better understood. The article develops one approach to understanding competencies that will, it is argued, enhance their transformative potential.

The “literary curriculum” seeks to make curriculum space legible. This requires denying that knowledge has backgrounds that cannot be made legible. Worse still, the attempt to make knowledge legible undermines that which can reasonably be described, and leaves it, if not unusable, then deficient. The difficulty facing those who are concerned with preserving an emphasis on “backgrounds that cannot be made foreground” is that the notion of background evades easy discussion. There are several… Read more

This article explores how schools might develop a curriculum and pedagogy for the understanding of thinking, rather than the knowing of thinking. It suggests viewing the understanding of thinking processes through Bereiter and Scardamalia’s interpretation of educational process in Popper’s three-world schema. Such an interpretation leads schools to the development of a more purposive thinking schema, allowing approaches to the curriculum “key competency” called thinking to be… Read more

This article looks at the current organisation of senior secondary curriculum in New Zealand, and raises some key questions that will need to be considered as we seek to develop a senior secondary curriculum designed for life in the twenty-first century. It asks: Do our current structures, for senior secondary curriculum, support goals and aspirations that have been articulated for twenty-first century senior secondary education, and, if not, what might need to change?

This article explores the value of listening to and heeding student voice. By doing so, teachers learn about the life experiences of students, and about how these contribute to the more formal learning environment of the classroom. They also learn the importance of explicitly articulating and adopting a relevant learning theory that acknowledges the classroom as a learning community, and so enables learning.

Though they are geographically close, England and France’s underlying philosophies regarding education and, for the focus of this paper, mathematics education, exhibit differences worth considering. The English system, influenced by the humanism school of thought, can be characterised by its desire to treat each student as an individual—and to guide the students in their social, emotional, as well as cognitive developments. In contrast, the French system places less emphasis on affective… Read more

Five conceptions of curriculum (i.e., humanist, social reconstructionist, skills, technological, and academic) are described and used to analyse the New Zealand Curriculum Framework. It is argued that the framework contains aspects of all five conceptions, despite their apparent contradictory nature. The conceptions were used in a study of 235 primary school teachers’ opinions as to the nature of curriculum. Teachers were found to be mostly in agreement with the humanist conception, while… Read more