Curriculum making: a brief history and future directions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The term \u2018curriculum making\u2019 is becoming increasingly common is 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 \u2018scientific\u2019 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 (e.g. teachers), products and infrastructure involved in and produced by such activity. The table below shows some of the principal theorisations of curriculum making, following Bobbitt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Table 1. An overview of curriculum theorisations.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Why is curriculum making such an important concept?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n First, I would argue that curriculum making lies at the heart of all educational practice. It involves consideration of \u2018why?\u2019 questions (purposes of education), \u2018what?\u2019 questions (consideration of knowledge and skills to be acquired and selection of content), and \u2018how?\u2019 questions (e.g. organisation of content, pedagogical approaches and assessment processes). The curriculum making models outlined above (table 1) point to the importance of both a systematic<\/strong> and a systemic<\/strong> 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This holistic overview involves a delicate balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches. Over-prescriptive, \u2018teacher-proof\u2019 approaches, found in various iterations of England\u2019s National Curriculum (e.g. 1990, 1999), deny the agency of teachers as professionals, reducing the curriculum to a set of instructions to be \u2018delivered\u2019. Conversely, more laissez-faire approaches, especially those framed around \u2018vague\u2019 learning outcomes, such as Scotland\u2019s Curriculum for Excellence<\/a>, can lead to unhelpful and inequitable variation across the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Curriculum making as a social practice <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, I make the case that the models emphasise a social practice<\/strong> view of curriculum (Priestley et al, 2021), in which curriculum is developed across the system by actors (e.g. 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 (e.g. 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 inter-relate, for example as policy is interpreted and translated, and educational programmes planned, developed, enacted and evaluated. This is not the somewhat indistinct \u2018totality of planned activity\u2019 approach articulated in Scotland\u2019s Curriculum for Excellence<\/a>, 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 (e.g. policy formation, programme planning, pedagogy) might inter-connect across the system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In conclusion, I would emphasise the importance of practitioners as collaborative curriculum makers \u2013 not just in their immediate settings, but as curriculum leaders across settings and co-constructers of policy. This reflects Stenhouse\u2019s (1975) famous aphorism that curriculum development and teacher development are intertwined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Deng, Z. (2012). School Subjects and Academic Disciplines: The Differences. In: A. Luke, et al (Eds.), Curriculum, syllabus design and equity: A primer and model<\/em>. New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Doyle, W. (1992). Constructing curriculum in the classroom. In F. K. Oser, A. Dick, & J. Patry (Eds.), Effective and responsible teaching: The new syntheses<\/em>. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Goodlad, J. (1979). The Scope of the Curriculum Field. In: J. Goodlad and Associates\u2019, Curriculum Inquiry: The Study of Curriculum Practice<\/em>. New York: McGraw-Hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Priestley, M., et al (2021). Curriculum Making: A conceptual framing. In: M. Priestley, et al, Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts.<\/em> Bingley: Emerald.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stenhouse, L. (1975). An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development<\/em>. London: Pearson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are delighted to launch this new blog, Curriculum Conversations, as the Stirling Curriculum Centre (SCC, formerly the Stirling Centre for Research into Curriculum Making) enters a new phase. Given<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/curriculumconversations.stir.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image.png\")
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