Who are the curriculum makers?
18th August 2022
Liz Chesworth
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‘Curriculum’ is a controversial concept that provokes strong viewpoints and lively debates about what, and how, children should learn. These debates are fuelled by differing perspectives about children, education, and what counts as valid ways of coming to know and understand. So, who are the curriculum makers in the early years? Who should be involved in curriculum decision-making, and what should inform these decisions? Discussion of curriculum often focuses on statutory frameworks that set the learning requirements for all children in a particular country or region. In England, for example, the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework prescribes the goals that children are expected to have attained by the end of the EYFS. Settings are accountable for children’s progress and educators might experience pressure for the goals to become the driving force for their curriculum decision-making. This interpretation is often connected with talk of curriculum ‘delivery’ or ‘implementation’.
We are interested in a different approach in which educators build the curriculum in collaboration with children and families. This approach recognises children’s capabilities and values their everyday lives as rich sources of learning. Building a curriculum that has relevance for the diverse contexts in which children live and learn begins with getting to know children and their families. Respectful and inclusive relationships enable educators to recognise and respond to the ‘real questions’ that children explore and express in their play.
Valuing the diverse experiences that children bring from home involves recentring whose intentions and interests matter so that the curriculum integrates, but is not defined by national outcomes or goals. The late educational theorist Ted Aoki described this as the experiences that are created in the middle space between ‘curriculum as plan’ and ‘curriculum as lived’. The space in which children’s ideas and intentions are interwoven with subject knowledge, including statutory goals, affords much potential for curriculum making.
Further reading
Aoki, Ted. (1986/1991) ‘Teaching as in-dwelling between two curriculum worlds.’ In W. Pinar and R. Irwin (Eds) (2004) Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki, London: Routledge.
Wood, Elizabeth & Hedges, Helen (2016) Curriculum in early childhood education: critical questions about content, coherence, and control, The Curriculum Journal, 27:3, 387-405, DOI: 10.1080/09585176.2015.1129981
Do you have examples of curriculum making that resonate with our project?
Has something on the website inspired you to try a different approach?
If so, we’d love to hear from you.
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