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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...