This paper is part of a larger research project (EDU2016-77576-P) linked with Spanish and European concerns about curriculum and educative relationships. The European strategic framework Education and Training 2020 underlines that curriculum reform plays a very important role in modernising the education system. For this reason, over the past decade there have been significant curricular reforms, both at national and European level, with the purpose of improving education and vocational training (CEDEFOP, 2012) But, what is curriculum? What is it purpose? How can it help to improve education?

Rarely there is a coincidence between the planned curriculum, what is expected to learn by students and what they really learn in their experience at school. Then we could use and attend to two different ideas of which may become the origin of tensions in teaching practice: curricular plan and lived curriculum.

For our research, we take the notion “curricular plan” as a symbolic object (Stenhouse, 1987) that gathers the ideas of all stakeholders that are interested, for different reasons, on giving their opinion about what must be included in the classroom (Olson, 2000). Curricular plan is framed in a traditional curricular perspective, which takes it as course of studies, namely, as objectives and contents that are expected to be acquired by students at the end of a school period.

Given that experience (lived curriculum) precedes any kind of learning, taking education merely in terms of instrumental application sets limits on the autonomy and growth of students, since they are seen as an “objective object” separate from their context and experience (Van Manen, 2003).

In order to answer to the reality of lived curriculum, Clandinin & Connelly (1992) created the concept “curriculum making”, which understand that curriculum is experience, which is lived in a particular situation and relationally (Dewey, 1997; Schwab, 2013),  so it is constructed and reconstructed narratively through the experience (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988).

When curriculum is understood as a plan or course of studies, it is forgotten that is the educative relationship what origins and promotes the construction of knowledge and, hence, makes learning possible. On this way teachers are living a continuous tension between two different voices: the requirements of curricular programs and their experience in the classroom with students.

From this concern arise the research questions: What tensions do exist between curricular plan and lived experience at school? How can teachers tackle tensions when curricular plan conflicts with the life of the classroom? Consequently, in order to answer to these questions we formulate the research proposal: delve into tensions lived by teachers between curricular plan and lived experience. This knowledge tries to open new lines of thought which can help to live tensions in a fruitful way (Contreras, 2016), instead of originate conflicts and disagreements with educational practice.

We talk in terms of tensions because it allows us to reflect the feeling that teachers live when they find themselves in the middle of opposing forces (Berry, 2007): on one hand are the objectives and contents of the curricular plan and, on the other hand, the necessity of attending to the particular life of the classroom.

Tensions can be lived in two different ways: either as a disagreement between opposing forces or as an impetus moving to ask and explore new ways of constructing the educative relationship, it means, in a fruitful way (Contreras, 2016). We do not try to solve or remove tensions because ambivalences are intrinsic to teaching profession. Rather, the goal must be to recognize them and manage the situation.

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