Curriculum Matters is, for me, a long overdue publication. Its genesis is due to the thinking of our colleagues in the Ministry of Education who wanted to encourage debate about curriculum, in particular with the current review of curriculum, and those at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research who ...

Spirituality has quietly featured in the secular school curriculum for decades but little attention was given to it until "spiritual well-being" was defined and briefly discussed in the 1999 Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum document (Ministry of Education, 1999). The definition provided in this statement, however ...

My aim in this article is to encourage educators to deeply consider the values of justice and care in curriculum design and delivery. To support this argument I describe interviews with 12 women who experienced a "separate knowing" (rules-based, abstract—Becker, 1996), high school mathematics education. Most rejected mathematics because they ...

The integration of curriculum has been of interest to educators since before the start of the 20th century. Today, an increasing number of New Zealand schools are embracing a variety of approaches to curriculum integration. At the same time, educational discourse continues concerning the constructivist approaches developed during the 1980s ...

Instrumentalism is a growing disposition of thought in authorised curriculum theory. It is detrimental to education because it enfeebles the curriculum's ethical orientation. Instrumentalism reflects an "instrumental orientation" that is based on five myths: (i) society causes goodness; (ii) individuals are radically free; (iii) individuals can handle this freedom; (iv) ...

The call for citizenship education as a compulsory part of the curriculum has met with a varied response worldwide. While everyone would espouse the ideals of ensuring our young people grow up to be active and fair-minded citizens, why does citizenship education not figure more prominently in our curriculum? This ...

The article discusses the varied and changing concepts of literacy and English. It is argued that these changes have implications for the place of literacy in the New Zealand curriculum. Literacy and literacies must be more explicitly addressed at all levels of the curriculum and within all curriculum areas. Reference ...

Future-focused theoretical thinking about education exhibits an ontological turn, with attendant advocacy for more attention to be paid to the nature of knowledge and to students' identity development. This article explores the second of these recommendations and makes the case that students' "selves" should be an important curriculum focus if ...

In this reflection on early childhood curriculum development in Aotearoa New Zealand since the mid-1980s, the author identifies some of the factors that were influential in the genesis, and subsequent implementation of Te Whāriki. The article concludes with a discussion of possible future directions in early childhood curriculum, including ...

A critical component in the development of students' statistical thinking and reasoning is transnumerative thinking; that is, changing representations of data to engender an understanding of observed phenomena. Examples from Years 6 to 9 New Zealand students' and Australian students' representations of data from a given multivariate dataset are described ...