Current school curriculum debates are led by transnational organisations such as UNESCO and the OECD, who play a powerful role in the formation of curriculum policies and practices globally. The OECD launched its Future of Education and Skills 2030 project in 2015. In 2017, UNESCO published global curricular guidelines in their Future Competences and the Future of Curriculum. In response, governments worldwide are adapting their education systems to fit a global and homogeneous curriculum model based on principles of accountability, measurement and comparison through high stakes testing. These developments often serve a conservative agenda allowing for increased control of and by the state through education. Meanwhile, local and contextualised ways of knowing and doing are being elided. Curriculum has become another tool that serves the prevailing global market logic in education that is focused on the development of human capital and economic growth.  

These are problematic developments that flatten out the diversity and differences in educational contexts. There is a need for more nuance in the development and implementation of curriculum to grapple with the reality of schools, the knowledge and experiences that students and teachers bring to the classroom and how curricular practices can lead to different, unfamiliar insights about others and the world. In this conceptual paper, I argue for ‘defamiliarization’, a term borrowed from the German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (1964). Being forced to question that which is given and familiar supports the transgression of personal experiences and encourages students and teachers to engage more deeply with worldly matters, intellectually and experientially. This kind of defamiliarization from existing notions of curriculum can encourage educators, researchers and policymakers to move away from global economic agendas and to work towards curricular policies and practices that support responsible participation in society and social change. Instead of a curriculum that is externally mandated and homogenised, schools can choose to approach curriculum as a ‘lived practice’, as conceptualised by Ted Aoki. Curriculum, then, is an active, analytical practice or praxis that is focused on the interactions between students and teachers, and that requires them to question their existing as well as newly acquired knowledge and experiences. 

I will look closely at four curriculum considerations: teacher artistry, negotiation and trust; the knowledge-experience nexus; curricular justice and the discipline dilemma. 

The conceptual insights explored in this paper emerged from my two year research collaboration with one secondary international school in Hong Kong and are underpinned by the actions and interventions that we undertook together. The collaboration was centred around one of the school's curricular initiatives. I draw extensively on the more recent work of Michael Young, William Pinar, Ted Aoki, Gert Biesta and to a lesser extent, Raewyn Connell. At times, the views of these scholars are in tension with one another, yet these tensions provide a productive dialectic that allows for an emergence of alternative curricular perspectives. These ‘conversations’ support a more nuanced approach to curriculum that moves away from dichotomies such as knowledge versus experience. Through actively engaging with historical and current curricular and wider educational debates, as well as problematising and rethinking how curriculum can be (re)conceptualised, I explore how curriculum and curricular debates can be approached differently.

This paper suggests that curriculum as a lived practice can guide teachers and students who are concerned with social change to offer appropriate responses by being challenged and defamiliarized from that which they accept as normal and true. My exploration comes with an invitation for education policymakers, researchers and practitioners to imagine curricular alternatives by starting to question some of the contemporary curricular givens, putting the good society and responsible citizenship first. I invite them to engage in Verfremdung as we move towards a curricular place and society we cannot know yet, or, with the words of Ted Aoki, a ‘curriculum in a new key’ (Aoki et al, 2004).

Aoki, T., Pinar, W., Irwin, R. (2004). Curriculum in a New Key: The Collected Works of Ted T. Aoki. Oxfordshire: Routledge. Brecht, B. (1964). Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. London: Eyre Methuen. OECD (2015). Future of Education and Skills 2030. Available at https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/about/ UNESCO (2017). Future Competences and the Future of Curriculum. Available at http://www.ibe.unesco.org/en/news/document-future-competences-and-future-curriculum