This presentation examines curriculum making as a material and materialized process that cuts across and brings together different sites of social activity pertaining to the constitution and negotiation of school and disciplinary knowledge. Focusing on the transition to new subject-area elementary curricula in the Republic of Cyprus and through the case of Geography, the presentation explores the materiality of curriculum making by (a) tracing how official policy was mediated and construed in varied texts and instructional materials distributed by official entities for the teaching of given subject areas, and (b) exploring how materials and artifacts were key players as these curricula were enacted in everyday classroom practice.

The focus on the materiality of curriculum making is theoretically grounded in notions of curriculum as social practice and sociomaterial understandings of classroom practice and education. Approaching curriculum as social practices draws attention to the ways in which teachers, students, materials and the official context in class interact in ways that personal/multiple meanings are constructed, rendering curriculum something that is made as practitioners and others come together to work with each other (Priestley et al., 2021). This complicates curriculum making as a hierarchical, linear process; it rather stresses that this should be understood as a messy, contingent process comprised of multiple social activities, including discourse generation, the design of official curriculum text, the production of resources and provision of guidance, as well as program-design, lesson-planning and particular interaction with the school and the classroom. A sociomaterial perspective extends this view by attending to the ways in which material objects not only mediate but are rather key players in networks comprised of human and nonhuman, material and immaterial forces (e.g., Burnett et al., 2018). It further helps understand how classroom discourse and subject matter are constituted in the coming-togetherness of material objects, human subject/ivities, spaces, and “scripts”, all of which hold agential potentiality in that they have an effect in the constitution and maintenance of the assemblage (e.g., Kalthoff & Roehl, 2011; Postma, 2012; Snaza et al. 2016).

These theoretical premises facilitate an examination of the ways in which disciplinary knowledge is construed as curriculum making was material/ized across social activities. This study focuses on Geography, which as a discipline and school subject, has been investigated for the ways in which it was widely mobilized to contribute to the national and colonial projects of schooling, including critiques for constricting pedagogies in which this has resulted.  It is also a school subject in which the ‘inquiry turn’ has been widely discussed as an internationally (e.g. Jun Lee, et al., 2021) and for the ways in which disciplinary approaches may transform the subject through powerful knowledge (often drawing on social realism e.g. Standish, 2017) or contesting those, by complicating pedagogy (e.g. Roberts, 2014; Catling & Martin, 2011). Sociomaterial studies of geography education move beyond debates over knowledge and its disciplinary boundaries to explore how material and immaterial, human and non-human actants assemble in geography classes (e.g. Bauer, 2015) and traverse those disciplinary boundaries.

In this paper we consider how the geography classroom at times of curriculum change is made up by such actants of different historicity within a particular phase of policy change, but also extending to previous such changes, thus being constantly assembled.  We thus pose the following research questions:

-    How are objects constituted as “knowledge objects” (Kalthoff & Roehl, 2011, p. 451) in official curriculum texts and officially-distributed instructional materials relating to the teaching of Geography in elementary classrooms?

-    How do objects, including material texts, enter into assemblages of human and non-human actants as curriculum emerges in everyday classroom practice?

This presentation draws on data from a qualitative inquiry that employs a case study methodology to explore Greek-Cypriot elementary teachers’ sense of professionalism and enactments of Language Arts and Social Studies (History, Geography, and Health Education) curricula in elementary classrooms. Cases of five female teachers were constructed through ethnographic data collection methods, which included participant and video-recorded observation of regular teaching practices during the school year 2015-2016, and a series of semi-structured, individual interviews with each of the teachers, supplemented by the archiving of related documents and instructional material. The year of data collection was distinct as a year of stabilization, after an intense five-year period of curriculum design, introduction, implementation, evaluation and restructuring. Data for this presentation are drawn from three case studies of teachers who taught Geography in two different grade levels (2nd and 6th). Selecting these cases was based on the realization that, despite a common official curriculum text, instructional materials for the support of teachers in the implementation of the new curriculum was differential across grades, given that units of study mediating the rationalities of the new curriculum were only gradually prepared for the first four Grades, whereas in the last two elementary grades the previous textbooks remained in use. This data is therefore supplemented with archival research and policy analysis that facilitated the examination of how disciplinary knowledge was materialized in educational policy discourse, as this was instantiated in official curricula, programs of study, and instructional materials distributed to elementary schools and teachers. In the case of Geography a shift towards an ‘inquiry’ approach in the official text was further materialized through professional development programs as well as the gradual design by seconded teachers of units of study, which were trialed in different classrooms with teachers, before their adaptation and ‘finalization’ in pupil textbooks and teacher guides; these were supplemented by additional instructional materials such as internet links, digital globes, GIS resources and ppt presentations at the subject’s web-site under the Ministry of Education and Culture. Data analysis thus includes the analysis of disciplinary discourse in official policy/curriculum texts to identify the position of material objects therein and also trace the tangible materials (texts, instructional resources) produced for mediating the discourse. This is combined with an analysis of selected classroom events as these are comprised of material objects, teachers as human (not humanist) actors, and immaterial forces, including sedimented notions of curriculum and subject matter.

The disciplinary discourse emerging from the official curriculum making and surrounding texts converged around a focus on ‘spatial thinking’ through structured ‘inquiry steps’ on geographical questions, the ultimate purpose being for pupils to understand the natural and human-made worlds as interconnected. Teaching units and supplementary materials included resources extending beyond material objects traditionally used in schools (e.g. wall maps, atlases, globes), to include numerous digital (projectable) resources, available to teachers through the MoEC’s web-site for Geography and related PD. However, analyzing the materiality of particular curriculum events highlighted the complexity and contingency of curriculum making in the classroom and how it conditioned curriculum change to multiple temporalities. In the 2nd grade classroom, Geography was taught mainly using the new textbook units, where ‘inquiry steps’ anticipated pupils’ collection and analysis of spatial information within and outside the classroom and from multiple types of maps and tools. However, teacher mediation emphasized the completion of pupil worksheets, use of material objects and movement close to the routines long established in school and across subjects. In the two 6th grade classrooms, several events highlighted the tension of teachers using the old Geography textbooks and material objects still available in schools as assembled in classrooms, but also how these were problematized by teachers, pupils and the materiality of some of the resources (e.g. access to web resources). These findings are discussed to highlight how materiality mediates school subject disciplinarity, through the case of Geography, and to problematize linear and humanist conceptualisations of curriculum change. The gravity of the im-materiality of curriculum change was visible not only between the different grades, for which formal curricula and materials followed different disciplinary rationalities, but even within each grade, as sedimented practices of schooling and geography education continued to shape and being shaped by teachers, pupils and non-human actants.

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