Multiple challenges that now need to be addressed in the field of education, both in terms of theory and practice, tower upon us globally and locally.  The very grounds of education call upon critical means, as Pinar (2004) wrote, to recapture the curriculum.  Some of the means may seem controversial, even if the cultural diversity is acknowledged as an issue of serious implications with regard to content and means of work in educational institutions.  In this paper, I will expore some of the means by which I have come to think of curriculum as a 'complicated conversation' to deal with 'new identities' (Pinar 2004, 1998).  Curriculum, I will argue, can be effectively used as a tool to develop an approach to teaching which will balance various needs of art and entertainment with that which is worth of knowing and using to sense and feel what it means to have a life and live accordingly in various nets of involvement locally and globally.  

Over the past decades I have sought to come to terms with such challenges, theoretically and practically, as a music educator working at an upper secondary level.  I have been guided on by reading in various fields, such as philosophy, education, music as well as studies addressing culture, curriculum and organizations and management.  Maxine Greene's thoughts and approach, which can be described as an applied pragmatist-artistic strategy, has inspired me to move on to reflect and explore issues of identity in terms of sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, socio-economic background and ethics or religion, to perform as an educator the body and the text (Jones & Stephenson eds. 1999) to trek on carefully on the path of education

Declining to 'take things for granted' - even if I only have had an inner sense of direction, within the larger frame of curriculum I have sought to analyze and interpret in terms of my own field, the arts and music - and be 'wide awake' to find alternative ways of putting curriculum in the practice.  Fruits of such ways have been reviewed at various international fora in 1996-2006, while I have combined, as if in a counterpoint, ideas from reading, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Habermas, Arendt and such, to combine together elements of pragmatist, phenomenological, post-structural and critical discourse.  I have been required to hold on to diverse scaffolds in order to make sense of multiple faces of the reality I have come to know and cope with the multiple demands of duty and dream. 

I have been most aided by poetic expressions or musical means, in which most heterogeneous means can be woven into sensible and meaningful textures, shapes and forms.  I will thus use artistic and aesthetic cues to discuss issues of curriculum and leadership by digging into matters of ontology and epistemology. I will thus argue that we need such alternative means to bridge the gaps in implementing policy into practice in order to avoid the built in traps of habit, comfort and bureaucracy.

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