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The term ‘curriculum making’ is becoming increasingly common in educational policy and practice. It is a concept with a long tradition in curriculum studies, going back to the foundational work of the early 20th-century American educationist, John Franklin Bobbitt, which focused on making the curriculum relevant through the ‘scientific’ analysis of society. Over time, curriculum making has come to mean something quite different, denoting activity – for example the formation of ideas about what matters in education, the framing of policy, and the enactment of practice in schools and other educational settings. Curriculum making relates to actors (such as teachers), products and infrastructure involved in and produced by such activity. Table 1 shows some of the principal theorisations of curriculum making, following Bobbitt.

Table 1: An overview of curriculum theorisations

Why is curriculum making such an important concept?

First, I would argue that curriculum making lies at the heart of all educational practice. It involves consideration of ‘why?’ questions (purposes of education), ‘what?’ questions (consideration of knowledge and skills to be acquired and selection of content), and ‘how?’ questions (organisation of content, pedagogical approaches and assessment processes). The curriculum-making models outlined above in table 1 point to the importance of both a systematic and a systemic approach to the formation of education practice. They illustrate the need to consider carefully and systematically what education is for, what knowledge is required to realise these purposes, and how education is best organised. The models point to the importance of a systemic approach, where policy is carefully formulated to provide a clear and purposeful conceptual frame for curriculum making in practice settings – an approach where we seek to understand how the system works in its totality; or, in other words, how policy might support meaningful educative practices in classrooms and other settings.

This holistic overview involves a delicate balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches. Over-prescriptive, ‘teacher-proof’ approaches, found in various iterations of England’s National Curriculum (such as 1990, 1999), deny the agency of teachers as professionals, reducing the curriculum to a set of instructions to be ‘delivered’. Conversely, more laissez-faire approaches – especially those framed around ‘vague’ learning outcomes, such as Scotland’s – can lead to unhelpful and inequitable variation across the system.

‘More laissez-faire approaches – especially those framed around “vague” learning outcomes, such as Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence – can lead to unhelpful and inequitable variation across the system.’

Curriculum making as a social practice

Second, I make the case that the models emphasise a ‘social practice’ view of curriculum (Priestley et al., 2021), in which curriculum is developed across the system by actors (such as teachers) working with one another. This challenges the ways in which we define curriculum, which is commonly described as the content taught. Such a definition does not account for practices that are curricular in nature, and which cannot be disentangled from questions of content. These practices include not just the framing of content in policy and its selection in programmes of study but also the organisation of content (for example into traditional or hybrid subjects, or interdisciplinary approaches) and how students engage with the content (pedagogical approaches). A social practice understanding of curriculum allows us to consider how such practices interrelate, for example as policy is interpreted and translated, and educational programmes planned, developed, enacted and evaluated. This is not the somewhat indistinct ‘totality of planned activity’ approach articulated in Scotland’s , but rather a way of seeing how different and defined practices articulate with one another. It also allows us to consider how unplanned aspects (the hidden curriculum) influence educational practices and outcomes. Finally, a social practice view allows us to understand how different curriculum-making activity (such as policy formation, programme planning, pedagogy) might interconnect across the system.

Conclusion

I would emphasise the importance of practitioners as collaborative curriculum makers – not just in their immediate settings but as curriculum leaders across settings and co-constructers of policy. This reflects Stenhouse’s (1975) famous aphorism that curriculum development and teacher development are intertwined.

References

Deng, Z. (2012). School Subjects and Academic Disciplines: The Differences. In A. Luke, K. Weir, A. Woods & M. Moroney (Eds.), Curriculum, syllabus design and equity: A primer and model (pp.40-73). Routledge.

Doyle, W. (1992). Constructing curriculum in the classroom. In F. K. Oser, A. Dick, & J. Patry (Eds.), Effective and responsible teaching: The new syntheses (pp.66-79). Jossey-Bass.

Goodlad, J. & Associates’ (1979). Curriculum Inquiry: The Study of Curriculum Practice. McGraw-Hill.

Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S., & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making: A conceptual framing. In M. Priestley, D. Alvunger, S. Philippou, & T. Soini (Eds.), Curriculum making in Europe: Policy and practice within and across diverse contexts (pp.1-28). Emerald.

Stenhouse, L. (1975). An introduction to curriculum research and development. Pearson.