Curriculum Matters 3 : 2007

As we know, a pessimist is someone who sees the glass of wine as half empty while the optimist is someone who sees it as half full. The pessimistic perspective with its emphasis on problems, often gets more attention, and this would be understandable when a new policy such as a curriculum document is released, entailing possible increases in teacher workloads. Yet over the last 12 months I have informally interacted with teachers and colleagues as they commented on the draft curriculum and… Read more

The Montessori movement recently celebrated a century of international education, spanning from early childhood through to tertiary experience. The first Casa dei Bambini, or children’s house, was opened in Rome, Italy, on 6 January 1907, and within three years the influence of Montessori education began to reach New Zealand shores.

This article outlines the Montessori approach to early childhood curriculum in general, and discusses findings from a small research project examining… Read more

An interpretive case study approach was used to investigate teachers’ understanding of the purpose and nature of social studies education and how teachers plan and develop their social studies programme. Data were gathered from eight teachers in a Years 3 and 4 syndicate at a large Auckland primary school through three complementary techniques: observation at syndicate meetings; documentary evidence; and semistructured interviews with four syndicate members. Overall, it was concluded that if… Read more

This article uses the story of Whakatauihuihu to help describe how the teaching of mathematics in te reo Māori (the Māori language) has developed. It begins by recounting the enthusiasm of the teachers who worked on the development of the mathematics vocabulary in the 1980s, and then moves on to show how the teaching of mathematics in te reo Māori is no longer seen as an innovation that will solve all problems for Māori students. Instead, like a teenager going through the initial phase of… Read more

Teachers teach out of who they are (Palmer, 1998), and teaching, or enacting curriculum, is what all teachers do, whether working in teacher education or at some other level of education. When the whole teacher is drawn into a relationship with their students, when connections are established, teaching is then a gifting of the teacher’s self, a relational engagement (Palmer, 2003). If education is about making choices, it needs to address the ethical responsibility of recognising wholeness… Read more

When education forsakes the middle for the ends or the beginnings, it is deadly. (Grumet, 1995, p. 17)

In her response to the question of “what is basic” to education, Madeleine Grumet argues that most schooling practices have forgotten that learning that matters to anyone is rooted in history, context, and practice. It has no real starting points or finishing lines but, rather, is always and already in the middle—in spaces amid past and future, fixed knowledge and emergent… Read more

The literary curriculum is not the literacy curriculum. The literary curriculum encompasses aspects of the taught curriculum, the assessed curriculum, and the processes of curriculum development and adjustment. The literary curriculum is named as such because it results from the systematic drive to make curriculum space legible, readable, and enumerable in ever-increasing detail. The aim is to display this space as ordered, predictable, and regulable. Unfortunately, the literary curriculum… Read more

If one were to name one year as the year that assessment was invented, that year would be 1980.  This proposition is not fully proven here, but a plausible argument is presented in its defence.

This article uses a specific curriculum innovation—a focus on the nature of science—to illustrate the complex dynamics of curriculum change.

Snapshots from the professional learning of two teachers, one primary and one secondary, are used to discuss why teachers’ personal learning may not translate into changes in their taught curriculum unless additional support helps them to rethink traditional teaching and learning practices.

Many Māori are rethinking curriculum development, delivery, and assessment as part of an agenda of ethnovisioning, and a resistance to educational philosophies that legitimate dominant paradigms for knowing and, as a consequence, subjugate Māori epistemologies. This new agenda advances Māori ways of knowing as legitimate and as a positive contribution to Māori wellbeing. The following discussion contributes to this agenda by examining a number of successful elements of Māori-centric… Read more