Movements to give renewed seriousness to questions of curriculum knowledge selection have gained pace since the mid 2000s (Yates & Young 2010). Across Europe and other continents, the question of how to ‘bring knowledge back in’ (Young 2008) has become focal to debates over curriculum, involving academics and government policy-makers. Among academics who celebrate that ‘Curriculum is back! Knowledge is back!’—as we have heard in ECER symposia of recent years—cheers are often accompanied by forceful renunciations of preceding ‘wrong turns’ variously characterised as ‘the pedagogic turn’, ‘the process turn’, ‘constructivism’, and valorisation of ‘everyday life knowledge’ (Yates & Grumet 2011). There are also defenders of those ‘turns’, and who argue that characterisations of what is now to be rejected are overdone, with the risk of throwing out babies with bathwater (Zipin, Fataar & Brennan 2015; Edwards 2014). Clearly an active, sometimes combative ‘politics of curriculum knowledge’ (Apple 2013) is underway. The debates have become high-stakes in that they parallel, and play into, the trend in many countries—including England and other Commonwealth countries—towards development of national curricula (Brennan 2011).

This paper argues that reforms now emerging as government policy tend to break along two sides of a limited binary coin. At best, they are mildly progressive but do not significantly ameliorate social-structural inequalities. At worst—the predominant effect, especially in national curricula—reforms are conservative and reproductive of inequalities (Bourdieu & Passeron 1977; Apple 2013). What is needed, we argue, is not continuation of re-formative politics, but what social philosopher Nancy Fraser calls a “transformative politics of framing [that] aims to change the deep grammar of frame-setting in a globalizing world” (2009:23). Applying this call for transformative politics to school curriculum, we argue that frame-transformation requires a ‘pragmatics’ of practical possibilities, taking account of historically sedimented ‘deep grammars’ institutionally codified in schooling. At the same time, for this pragmatics to be trans-formative requires that it be ethically driven: “The problematic of framing”, suggests Fraser (2009:2; original italics), hinges on the ethically charged question: “What, if anything, should delimit the bounds of justice?” (ibid; italics added).

Following Berlant (2016), we argue that an ethically-driven-pragmatics for curriculum transformation must respond to crisis conditions calling urgently for robust social justice in the verging future. We are in a historical period, argues Berlant, not simply of ‘globalisation’, but of structural “crisis times” which registers in local life—in “infrastructure”, which Berlant calls “the lifeworld of structure”—as “collectively held sense[s] that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life”, i.e. senses of “infrastructural failure” (2016:393). Such conditions, says Berlant, call for a “pedagogy of unlearning” that frees imaginative thought and pro-action towards “build[ing] affective infrastructures … [that] hold out the prospect of a world worth attaching to that’s something other than an old hope’s bitter echo” (2016:414). 

From the above contextualising arguments for why curriculum ‘reform’ impulses need to give way to a politics of transforming deep-grammars, which current debates have not exceeded, our paper moves to its main project. This is to outline an ethical-pragmatic rationale for school curriculum that activates students, collaborating with a range of social actors, to taking up and work upon knowledge from multiple sources of expertise—across boundaries of school, local lifeworlds and global contexts—with focus on what we call ‘problematics that matter’. Our curriculum rationale draws significantly on the Funds of Knowledge approach to curriculum design and its Vygotskyan basis (Vygotsky 1962; Moll 2013), joined to Isabelle Stengers’ philosophical pragmatism (Stengers 2015; Pignarre & Stengers 2011), as we explain in the ‘Methodology’ below. 

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