Curriculum is one of the key concepts in higher education because it defines where the students have access and what they eventually gain from higher education (Barnett and Coate, 2005). Through the curriculum, the core of the disciplinary & professional field is put into practice in teaching (Bernstein, 2000). However, several studies show that curriculum is not a shared concept in higher education institutions and communities. For some, curriculum is a narrow, technical instrument to direct the study process to reach relevant contents or competencies, whereas for some others, curriculum is a broad concept that includes student’s personal growth, epistemic agency and transformational process through which they could contribute broadly to the world (Ashwin, 2020; Beres, 2025; Fraser and Bosanquet, 2006).

Curriculum is a crossroad where different stakeholders, interests and educational purposes meet. Also today we face negotiations about what it should include or what to exclude, and how it should be implemented, those discussions being connected to values, epistemological choices and power relations. Curriculum enables negotiations of the individual and collective interests; the relation between teaching, research, and students' engagement with knowledge; the administrative, scientific, and pedagogical practices and cultures in different institutions; and,  the internal and external objectives for education (Annala, 2023). It also brings forward topical questions: what stance curriculum should take to face the questions of equity, diversity and inclusion, decolonisation of knowledge, and preparation for working life in a world with several challenges like climate change, wars, generative AI, divided societies with fake news and post-truth bubbles. Thus curriculum making always takes place in a certain cultural, historical, societal, economical and political environment (Pinar, 2004). 

Currently we are able to identify several interests and tensions shaping higher education curricula (Krause, 2020; Wheelahan and Moodie, 2025). The local and global political and economic forces, through their funding policies, direct which fields of research and teaching are seen of value and which not, raising concerns about autonomy and freedom in teaching. The shift or return to the emphasis of (industry-aligned) learning outcomes raise questions about the broader educational task of higher education for an unknown future (’bildung’). The move towards a more generic curriculum, interdisciplinary programmes and fragmentary microdegrees, raise questions about the lack of systematic disciplinary knowledge that has been a specific feature of higher education. 

Additionally, the widening access to higher education with a more heterogeneous student body brings forward the question: are all students offered epistemic access to systematic knowledge? In parallel the expectations for efficient study tracks entails the questions of meaningful learning and student’s journey that may be a messy process with struggles and moments of immersion, that cannot be rushed and should not be mechanized (Hou, 2025; Sarauw, 2023). Within this context student-staff co-creation in and of curriculum (Bovill & Woolmer, 2019) has been featured as a way of avoiding the risk of perpetuating hegemonic forms of knowledge and creating irrelevant curricula that exclude student perspectives.

In this symposium, we discuss these questions by presenting recent studies, including both broader and context specific papers on curriculum, implemented in HE institutions of different types, and in various country contexts. Authors of the papers come from Canada, Finland, Netherlands, Portugal, and the UK, and the discussant is from Ireland.

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