Drawing on the theorization of curriculum making as a web of enactment, as social practices which organically occur within and across sites of social activity (supra, macro, meso, micro and nano), rather than administrative levels, of education systems (Priestley & Philippou, 2018; Priestley, et al., 2021), the aim of this paper is to illustrate how the nano-site, as instantiated in teaching in school classrooms, is constantly connected with the rest of the sites and thus inseparable from curriculum (Deng, 2017). Drawing on ‘curriculum events’ as joint ‘negotiations’ in classroom settings, shaped by and shaping teachers and pupils (Doyle, 1992), the paper focuses on an elementary school classroom in Cyprus to render visible both the nano-site’s unpredictability and uniqueness in the present-as-it-becomes-past and its recognizability as a pedagogical space with a particular historicity within schooling. It does so through ethnographic data (policy and curriculum materials, video-recordings of lessons and teaching materials used during those, multiple interviews) from the case of a Greek-Cypriot teacher, Niki, and her history lessons in her 3rd grade class over a school year in 2015-2016, a year of introduction of an official curriculum restructured to include success and efficiency indicators in all subject-areas, after a 5-year process of curriculum reform,. History has been a subject-area traditionally carrying the weight of fueling national identities as heritage, but has been challenged internationally by disciplinary, epistemologically-sensitive approaches, an ‘inquiry turn’ also formally introduced in the recent curriculum reform in Cyprus (Philippou, 2020). Curriculum events drawn from the nano-site are analysed to illustrate its complex and simultaneous connections with the rest of the sites and their historicity: Niki’s teaching pointed to how curriculum was enacted as informed by this supra-site of transnational discourse on history education as it was recontextualized at the macro-site, but was also mediated by the meso-site through the activity of teacher educators, subject-area counsellors and inspectors and the production of related materials and professional development. At the same time, her teaching was informed by school activities as a micro-site, either initiated by Niki herself or by other actors in the school, including pupils, and shaped by material resources. Finally, curriculum enactment in class was mediated by pupils, herself as teacher and by material and immaterial conditions pertaining to the classroom space and the disciplinarity of History. These connections are discussed as patterns of curriculum making, as granular, historicized social practices, yet entangled through teaching in the present.

Deng, Z. (2017). Rethinking curriculum and teaching. In G. W. Noblit (Ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (1-25). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doyle, W. (1992). Curriculum and pedagogy. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 486–516). New York: Macmillan. Priestley, M. & Philippou, S. (2018). Editorial of Special Issue: Curriculum-making as social practice: complex webs of enactment. The Curriculum Journal, 29(2), 151-158. Priestley, M., Philippou, S., Alvunger, D., & Soini, T. (2021). Curriculum making: a conceptual framing. In Priestley, M., Alvunger, D., Philippou, S., & Soini, T. (Eds.) Curriculum making in Europe: policy and practice within and across diverse contexts (pp. 1-27). UK: Emerald Publishing. Philippou, S. (2020). Tracing Disciplinarity in the History Classroom: the cases of two elementary school teachers amid curriculum change in the Republic of Cyprus. In C. Berg & T. Christou (Eds.), Historical thinking in the 21st century: reimagining history education. The Palgrave Handbook of History and Social Studies Education (pp. 95-114). Palgrave.