In this paper we trace notions of ‘curriculum’ as emerging in sociopolitical and historicized contexts, where both constancy and change are possible, through the life histories of Greek-Cypriot primary teachers across six cohorts that correspond to different periods (late 1950s-2010s). By tracing such narrated notions, we highlight how they are connected to an institutional context marked by both change and constants. Inquiring into the various definitions of ‘curriculum’ in the literature, we note that it was used in education (along with class) to organize the whole multi-year course (in all years and subjects) by the principles of disciplina (a sense of structural coherence) and ordo (a sense of structural sequencing) in some of the first European universities (Hamilton, 1989/2009). This rationality of organizing and planning schooling through curricula or different types, tracks and grades also informed the spread of mandatory public schooling through which curricula were mobilized as a mechanism of modernist governance of populations by nation-states (Ball, 2013). In such contexts of administration and governance ‘curriculum’ has largely been conceptualized as institutionalized text, embedded in various practices, but materially manifested in the form of official curricular documents, (subject-area) syllabi, guides or frameworks, plans (of content or subject-matter), course outlines, programmes of instruction, timetables for any or all subjects.  These constitute what Doyle names ‘programmatic curriculum’, locating it between its ‘societal’, and ‘classroom/instructional’ representations of curriculum (1992a; 1992b) or between Deng, Gopinathan and Lee’s (2013) ‘policy’ and ‘classroom curriculum making’ because it ‘translates the ideals and expectations embodied in the policy curriculum into programmes, school subjects, and curricular frameworks’ (p. 7).  How the programmatic curriculum is specifically materialized, its ‘technical form’ Luke, Woods & Weir (2012) argue, is replete with power issues: inspired by Foucault’s (1972) ‘grids of specification’, ‘that is an institutional structure for mapping human knowledge and human subjects’ (Luke et al., 2012, p.3), the technical form has implications for the selection, classification and hierarchization of important and valued school knowledge; grids do this as they ‘divide, contrast, regroup and derive what will constitute, now, from the unlimited possibilities available’ the curriculum.  The technical form also has significant ramifications for teacher professionalism because ‘high definition, or extremely elaborated, detailed and enforced technical specifications and low definition, that is, less elaborated, detailed and constrained curriculum act as degrees of central prescription’ (p. 7, authors’ emphasis) and constrain or enable it; respectively they encourage or discourage ‘teacher and student autonomous action, critical analyses of local contexts, teachers’ bending and shaping of curriculum to respond to particular students’ needs and to particular school and community contingencies’ (p. 7).  Such problematizations of ‘high definition’ forms could be inspired by a distinction between the institutional and the instructional context, the latter situated, diverse, contingent and unpredictable, materialized as ‘classroom’ or ‘enacted’ curriculum which ‘entails transforming the programmatic curriculum (embodied in curriculum materials) into “educative” experiences for students’ (Deng, Gopinathan and Lee, 2013, p. 7). Pragmatist, historical, (auto)biographical and poststructural approaches (e.g. Doyle, 1992a; Pinar & Grumet, 1976/2015; Clandinin & Connelly, 1992), for instance, have been problematizing bureaucratic and managerial discourse through which curriculum is constituted as a regulative apparatus to achieve consistency, conformity and control of how teachers and students should be acting and performing in schools; instead, the ‘complexity of curriculum making at the societal, institutional and classroom levels’  (Deng, 2021, p. 1670) requires our empirical attention; we argue that in this study we highlight the complexities of translating the programmatic into the instructional curriculum by tracing how teachers narrate its enactment over the last 60 years, in an institutional context where central prescription has been constant, yet changing. 

The paper combines data from two studies that draw on biographical research and life history interviewing to develop a history ‘from below’ of teacher professionalism and of the teaching profession over six decades in the Republic of Cyprus (mid-1950s to mid-2010s). Central in these inquiries are the life histories of 58 Greek-Cypriot elementary teachers who studied in local public institutions and fall into six cohorts roughly corresponding to each of the six decades of interest. Participating teachers have varied characteristics in terms of their gendered identities, academic credentials, place of residence, and types of schools where they served, while each cohort shares experiences in terms of their higher education and credentials (from teacher college and pedagogical academy diplomas in the former cohorts to university degrees and postgraduate education in the latter ones) and the profession’s attractiveness and social status. Following a biographic research approach, we collected data through multiple, semi-structured life history interviews with each of the participants, following a three-step process which, as described by Goodson (2008), involves the conducting, transcription and sharing of in-depth interviews whereby participants are provided opportunities to narrate, amend, and expand their life histories. Interviews were complemented with the collection of personal artifacts and official documents circulated around significant time periods, as those emerged in the participants’ hi/stories. Individual teachers’ life histories were thematically analyzed, followed by the cross-analysis of life hi/stories within and across cohorts. For the purposes of this paper, thematic and cross-analysis of teachers’ life hi/stories was based on axial coding of emic codes that adhered to teachers’ perceptions of curriculum at different points of their professional careers and, especially, at times of curriculum change and educational reform. Given that interviews were conducted in Greek, a language in which the term mainly used has been ‘Αναλυτικό Πρόγραμμα’ (in the singular or plural) (Analytical programme) or ‘Πρόγραμμα Σπουδών’ (Programme of Study) when denoting official texts (Author A, 2014), we accounted for teachers’ verbatim use of these terms, but also traced more subtle or broad meanings of the (school) curriculum as they referred to planning, textbooks, teaching materials, tools, guides, guidelines as well as purposes-objectives, activities, methods/pedagogy and assessment. Doing so, we were interested in identifying different notions of curriculum, but to primarily trace the ways in which it was materialized and served as a key governance mechanism that persisted, despite changes in its instantiations over time.

In teachers' narrations, the programmatic curriculum appeared in different forms, yet all cohorts connected it with subject-area textbooks. This constant relates to curriculum enactment as teachers’ primary field of action, yet points to materializations of the programmatic in a centralized educational system relying on the monopoly of single, state-designed and distributed textbooks. In this form, curriculum thus orders knowledge by marking distinctions between subject areas and delineating distinct pedagogical/teaching practices. The introduction of new curriculum texts in 2010 marked a significant shift away from textbooks, especially for cohorts serving as classroom teachers at that time. ‘Curriculum’ appeared widely to refer to official institutional text in teachers’ narrated attempts to mediate it in classroom contexts. This later involved a change in technical form, as those official texts were restructured into ‘success and efficiency indicators’ in 2016, to map subject-specific skills, knowledge, and competences onto detailed grids and match those to appropriate teaching methods. Curriculum, as compilation of ‘indicators’ and pedagogy, overtly classified and organized school knowledge, despite teachers’ reports of official guidelines intending to make space for localized enactments. Yet, official practices (e.g., detailing methodology, adjusting or designing materials to match indicators) and teachers’ demands for guidance perplexed this possibility. Moreover, reports that teachers performatively utilized ‘indicators’ only upon planning (rather vice versa) or considered them as their familiar ‘goals and objectives,’ suggested challenging their newness or usefulness. Curriculum and related terminology were strikingly scarce in the narrations of youngest cohort of teachers mostly employed in part-time, non-permanent positions and only possible to utilize “indicators” in exceptions (substituting classroom teachers or preparing for teacher appointment state exams). Exploring such overt and nuanced notions of the curriculum, we thus discuss how the programmatic, in its varied forms and shapes, has constantly sorted not only school knowledge but also teachers as professionals.

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