Recent scholarship has sought to reframe curriculum making as social practices that occur across multiple sites of activity (Priestley et al. 2021; Alvunger et al; 2021). This view suggests that curriculum making takes various forms, for example the production of national policy frameworks, the development of programmes of study in schools and other educational institutions, and the transactional curriculum that occurs as teachers and students engage pedagogically in classrooms and other learning spaces.

Different sites are associated with these different forms of activity: supra curriculum making concerning the generation of discourses, often global in scale about curriculum; macro curriculum making comprising the development of policies, generally at a national scale; meso curriculum making involving the activities and infrastructure that support curriculum making in educational institutions; micro curriculum making being the formation of curricular programmes at the level of educational institutions; and nano curriculum making occurring in classrooms and other learning contexts. The key features of this thinking – both challenging and elaborating previous conceptualisations of curriculum making – are that it is non-linear, with actors, ideas and processes flowing in multiple directions between different sites.

The above framing provides a conceptual basis for this double symposium. Drawing upon cases from several European contexts, each presentation focuses on curriculum making within a particular site (or multiple sites) and explores the contextual conditions that shape curriculum making in the site or sites in question, as well as emergent patterns of curriculum making. Part one of the symposium has a focus on meso/micro curriculum making, comprising papers from Finland, the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands. The second part shifts the emphasis more towards the micro/nano, with a greater focus on curriculum making in classrooms, featuring papers from the Scotland, Sweden and Cyprus.

Alvunger, D., Soini, T., Philippou, S. & Priestley, M. (2021). Conclusions: Patterns and trends in curriculum making in Europe. In: M. Priestley, D. Alvunger, S. Philippou. & T. Soini, Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald. Priestley, M., Philippou, S., Alvunger, D. & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum Making: A conceptual framing. In: M. Priestley, D. Alvunger, S. Philippou. & T. Soini, Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts. Bingley: Emerald.