Curriculum Development through Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry

In recent years, we have witnessed changing fashions in curriculum policy (Priestley and Biesta 2013) in many countries. A particular trend is an apparent reinstatement of the teacher as an active agent of change in developing the curriculum, seen in a shift from input regulation of the curriculum to output regulation (Kuiper and Berkvens 2013). The former is about tight front-door prescription of the curriculum (ibid.), typically with mandated content, and in some cases regulated pedagogy. The latter is back-door regulation of the outcomes of teaching, for example through inspections and the evaluative use of examinations data. Ostensibly, this might seem to afford teachers greater autonomy in curriculum making. Underpinning such trends has been an ongoing debate about the success or otherwise of mandated curriculum reform policy (e.g. Cuban 1998). A specific concern has been the ‘implementation gap’ (Supovitz and Weinbaum 2008) between policy intention and classroom practice, attributed to the potential for teachers to significantly modify or mediate the intrinsic logics of the curriculum policy to match the institutional logics of the setting where it is enacted (Young 1998), even where input regulation has been tightly prescribed as in the case of England’s 1988 National Curriculum (Bowe et al. 1992).