Contemporary education policy often invokes “enjoyment” as though it were self-evident: a feature of learning assumed to support attainment. Yet this language is frequently instrumental and conceptually thin (Connolly, 2013, 2019). In England, “enjoyment” appears sporadically and tends to be positioned as a means to other ends; it offers little guidance on what enjoyment requires in practice (i.e., time, trust, creativity) (Connolly, 2013, 2019; DfE, 2011, 2014; Ofsted, 2019). It can also sit awkwardly inside measurement-driven accountability cultures in which performing the “right” affect becomes part of being recognised as successful (Ball, 2003; Connolly, 2019).  

This poster presents findings from one strand of the broader Articulating Curriculum with Children project, focusing specifically on how young people conceptualise joy in relation to curriculum. Rather than treating joy as an individual emotional state or enrichment feature, we position it as a curricular question: a way of examining what curriculum-in-practice enables, constrains, and makes possible. 
By “articulating curriculum with children”, we mean creating conditions in which young people are treated not merely as respondents to adult-designed questions, but as credible interpreters and co-theorisers of educational experience. Within this framing, joy becomes a way of examining how curriculum is made and lived through the intersections of time, relationships, knowledge, pedagogy, and assessment, and the extent to which students experience schooling as emotionally safe, meaningful, and creatively alive. We are not suggesting that all learning should be pleasurable all the time, nor that joy is the only educational aim. Rather, we use curriculum theory to ask what schooling implicitly designs children to feel and be, and what becomes visible when young people are treated as credible theorists of that lived curriculum. 

Conceptually, our work draws on curriculum-as-social-practice (curriculum not as a static “plan” but as something enacted through agency and relations; Priestley, 2011), and on student voice/democratic participation traditions that take seriously children's roles in educational discourse and decision-making (UN General Assembly, 1989; Robinson & Taylor, 2007), including “radical collegiality” (Fielding, 2001). We also draw on care ethics (Noddings, 2005) and engagement-oriented accounts of learning (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) to understand joy as relational: an environmental quality marked by trust, cooperation, and imaginative possibility.  

The overarching questions that this project explored include: 1) how children conceptualise “curriculum” and what they think curriculum should fundamentally include; and 2) what students reveal (conceptually and practically) when invited into speculative “what if” curriculum design through creative workshop methods (Costello, 2023). 
This elicited a range of responses concerning what children felt curriculum should include, and how these priorities might be realised in practice. Arising from that we draw a set of findings that include curriculum through relation, curriculum for becoming, curriculum for presence, and curriculum for joy.  In this poster we focus on this latter finding.  
Our key research question here is: How do young people conceptualise joy in relation to curriculum, and what curriculum conditions do they identify as enabling or constraining it across contrasting educational settings?
Across Europe, wellbeing and learner agency are increasingly visible in policy rhetoric, while accountability pressures can narrow what counts as worthwhile learning (Ball, 2003). We offer a transferable, student-generated vocabulary for thinking about joy as a curricular question: not simply how to make lessons more enjoyable, but how to design curriculum that sustains meaning, agency, relational learning, and humane rhythms of life.   We hope that the poster format will allow for discussions and reveal potential for collaboration to investigate these ideas in different European settings.  

This was a qualitative study, seeking subjective and contextual perspectives from children through group interviews incorporating arts-based methods to inspire deeper discussion and creative ideas. The arts-based methods were designed in collaboration between artists and research team members. Institutional ethical consent was granted, in line with BERA guidelines in the UK. We generated data with three different educational settings, making three visits to each setting as follows: To introduce the project, and to discuss consent and ethics; To explore the meaning of curriculum in each setting using arts-based and creative methods; and To carry out a group interview to talk about emerging findings from previous visits, and to develop discussions about what matters to children in curricula and schools, and what might be important to include in a curriculum that recognises the importance of joy in learning. The settings included one state school following a traditional English Curriculum, one setting that worked with home-schooled children, and one setting that followed an alternative curriculum. In each setting we worked with between 6 and 8 students (total 20 participants) aged between 12 and 14 years old. Common data collection protocols were maintained across all sites, with minor adaptations to take account of contexts. Data were transcribed and subjected to dual coding involving regular intercoder reliability and team sense-making discussions. Where possible we may return to settings again to engage in further discussions of emerging findings.

Across settings, young people framed joy as relational rather than individualistic: it was located in belonging, trust, and shared activity, rather than in isolated “fun” moments. Participants resisted narrow definitions of curriculum as a content list, describing curriculum instead as lived experience (i.e., through metaphors of journeys, choices, and environments), suggesting curriculum is encountered as a set of conditions shaping daily life and learning, not only specifications and plans. Our analysis identified seven cross-setting themes, with shifts in emphasis illuminating how curriculum-in-practice shapes joy. Social connection moved from affective belonging and emotional safety, through implicit collaboration, to more functional peer learning that “helps ideas develop faster”. Agency strengthened across settings: participants critiqued control and argued for choice, and, when invited to redesign learning through “if you were in charge” prompts, made confident proposals that position them as curriculum makers. Across settings, students emphasised being present in the curriculum and how it is designed: not only experiencing it but actively shaping it. Joy was repeatedly associated with creativity and self-exploration without fear of judgement; art and making were described as spaces where exploration was protected from performance pressures. Life skills became increasingly salient, indicating that joy is not opposed to usefulness but often linked to learning relevant beyond school. Participants consistently raised rhythm and balance, resisting schooling that totalises and arguing for family life and rest, space - framing joy as a matter of humane time. Taken together, these emerging findings position joy as a diagnostic of curriculum conditions: young people’s accounts make visible what gets compressed when schooling is organised around constant measurement, and what becomes possible when care, agency, creativity, and humane time are designed in (Ball, 2003; Connolly, 2019). We distil these insights into child-derived curriculum design principles and reflective prompts for identifying joy-supporting and joy-eroding features of curriculum-in-practice.

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