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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Cold War, and especially the launch of Sputnik, meant changes in curriculum development throughout the Western world. New Zealand was no exception. Our model, the Curriculum Development Unit (CDU), later the Curriculum Development Division (CDD), was relatively unique, heavily oriented towards teacher involvement. In the 1960s and early 1970s ...

Much is invested in, and expected of, a New Zealand curriculum. Following curriculum developments in the 1990s, a curriculum stocktake was carried out from 2000 to 2002, to investigate issues such as the manageability of the current curriculum, and the capability of teachers to meet the demands of the curriculum ...

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 ...

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 ...