This paper builds on our previous paper (Gleeson, Doyle, O’Neill, 2025) which mapped the historical origins of learning outcomes and the contrasting education paradigms and curriculum cultures that are at play across the curriculum sites of education in the Republic of Ireland.  We argued that the emerging curricula whilst trying to move from a tradition adherence to Anglo-American curriculum culture in the direction of Didaktik (Gleeson, 2022), poses a hybridization happening within the curriculum design and enactment processes.  The replacement of traditional syllabus documents with subject specifications characterised by large numbers of pre-determined learning outcomes, is “highly problematic” (Priestley, 2016, 4), creating many conundrums and questions. 

As a follow on from this, the present study examines the perspectives of policymakers and key stakeholders regarding the rationale for, and implementation of, a Learning Outcomes approach to curriculum design, development and enactment at second level in Ireland. It will query the resulting hybrid approach with actors at the Macro and Meso level and will conclude by exploring how curriculum making might be reimagined to support pedagogical practice.

A further paper will turn its attention to exploring how practicing teachers’ use Learning Outcomes and what value they place on them as important tools of curriculum making. 

The theoretical framework in this study is based on the Haraway’s (2016) concept of Speculative Fabulation which she describes as composed of the following:

1.   A method of tracing, the following of a thread in the dark.  We began the tracing of this thread in our first paper which moves from the inception of Learning Outcomes at the Bologna Declaration 1999, to the emergence of a new approach to curriculum design across national and international jurisdictions.  We offer the prism of contrasting education paradigms and curriculum cultures to disrupt the previous lack of critical engagement and consideration of Learning Outcomes.

2.   The actual thing, the pattern and assembly that solicits response (evident in junior and senior cycle where we interrogate the broader social, cultural, political, historical and economic context through our interviews with the different macro and meso agencies in education in Ireland.

Haraway describes scholarship as “passing on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and moving, anchoring and launching” (p.10) and she articulates that this can only happen as a process of becoming-with (not becoming), which is how partners in learning are rendered capable, learning to interact and train together in speculative fabulation. This theory rests on the idea that there are threads of thoughts that think thoughts, ideas that think ideas, and knowledges that know knowledges.  Here, we search for these threads within the dominant narratives of learning outcomes. It is also a challenge to educators to rail against commonplace thoughtlessness, where educators and policy developers cannot make present to themselves what is absent, what is not within their realm of thinking. Instead, the challenge is to cultivate ‘response-ability’ which involves learning things that are not “known” and widening spaces instead of shutting them down. Being response-able means “the high stakes training of the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated, to take up unasked-for obligations of having met.” (2016, p.130)

It is within this frame that we examine learning outcomes through the eyes of the macro and meso stakeholders (e.g. National Council of Curriculum and Assessment; Department of Education; State Examinations Commission; Unions; Teaching Council etc.), their integration into the dominant narratives in education and their capacity to cultivate response-ability.  

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a systematic, linguistic analysis of discourse which sees the text in its social, political and economic context (Joye & Maeseeke, 2022). Language is not neutral and always actively constructs a specific reality with a specific meaning given to it. It is more than words and encompasses everything that carries meaning. Given the critical stance, CDA aims to deconstruct ideology and power relations that are articulated by means of a (socially shared) group of statements, ideas, images, etc., regarding a specific topic (Joye & Maesseke, 2022, p.8). This approach will assist in helping us map out the complexities of the language of learning outcomes and the meaning and sense-making surrounding them from the perspectives of the macro and meso stakeholders, and critically engage in their social, economic, political and cultural relationships that build the meaning and intention. According to Jorgensen & Phillips, (2002), CDA not only reflects a specific reality but also “actively constructs a specific reality by giving meaning to reality, identities, social relations…(p.1). The aim of the paper will be to interrogate the broader social, cultural, political, historical and economic context which moves beyond the linguistic analysis to its ideology, power relations and articulation. This will be achieved through semi-structured interviews of twenty key stakeholders involved in the development of these texts and subject specifications at lower and senior secondary levels. The main questions will revolve around the perceptions of the key partners in the adoption of Learning Outcomes. Data is analysed through various readings and re-readings of the texts and interviews, familiarizing and noting patterns or opposing patterns. The approach will be systematic and further reading will contextualize the findings by incorporating the dimensions of discursive and social practices as outlined by Richardson (2007) and Machin & Mayr (2012).

This research focuses on the adoption of Learning Outcomes in the Republic of Ireland. However, as many countries across the world have followed a similar approach, it is important to highlight the emerging challenges and benefits of this complex process. Interrogating the sense making process of a wide range of macro and meso stakeholders will allow the research team to understand why a hybrid mix of curriculum theory and cultures are being used in curriculum reform today. Over the coming months, we will interview, transcribe and analyze data so that we can offer the ECER 2025 audience a powerful narrative of complex curriculum decision making. Using the lens of learning outcomes, this empirical research charts the way forward by presenting a knowledge base on the many issues and problems emerging for curriculum makers today.

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