This presentation contrasts curricular authorship in Australia and Israel. In the dynamic process of curricular alignment (Martone & Sireci, 2009), authorship is a central consideration: Authorship of national curriculum documents and their state, regional and school level instantiations; authorship of assessment instruments at state, regional, school and classroom level; authorship of textbooks, teacher guides and online resources, provided commercially or by state jurisdictions or professional associations to support school and classroom level curriculum implementation; and authorship of the topic and lesson plans by which the curriculum is given performative realisation in the classroom. Research Questions: What are the influences and values that shape each stage in the iterative reinterpretation of the mathematics curriculum? What are the documents progressively generated in this process, including textbooks, curricular guidelines and accompanying resources, assessment instruments and lesson plans? How are these authored and by whom? Comparison across different school systems reveals local practices and assumptions, facilitating their interrogation. Our research design uses document analysis and interviews to exploit these differences in order to identify elements critical to the implementation of any national curriculum. Data sources analysed for this presentation included curriculum documents at all levels of the school system and interviews with key stakeholders (e.g. curriculum developers, policy makers, principals, school curriculum coordinators, heads of school mathematics departments, textbook publishers and authors, and classroom teachers of mathematics). The interpretation of the various accounts of curricular decision-making provided fascinating contrasts in the distribution of curricular responsibility from the state to teachers and schools. In Israel, the responsibility for determining curricular structure (what to teach and when) resides outside the school with the national curricular writing team, and through regional mentors, who support schools in their implementation of the curriculum. A teacher’s primary responsibility is to decide not what to teach but which textbooks to use in order to best teach the prescribed content. Australia, by contrast, devolves substantial curricular authoring responsibility to the school, and expects teachers and school curriculum leaders to make significant decisions about the structure and sequencing of mathematics content. This presentation focuses on national curricular reform in Australia and Israel, as characterized by forms of authorship, and examines differences between the two school systems and the consequences of those differences. The contrast makes clear just how differently curriculum implementation is mediated in the two school systems and the findings have implications for curricular enactment in school systems in Europe and elsewhere.

Martone, A., & Sireci, S. G. (2009). Evaluating alignment between curriculum, assessment, and instruction. Review of Educational Research, 19(9), 11-16.