During my PhD on the use of multimodal texts in the English classroom, I realized I wasn't going to just read all the cool stuff on digital literacy. At the doctoral level, I was going to have to tackle what felt like an insurmountable mountain of curriculum scholarship. I resisted as long as possible. It wasn't even something I thought I was interested in, but when you use words like “curriculum” and “pedagogy,” you have to know where they come from, right? So I began to read, and three years later, I emerged as an ardent early career researcher in curriculum inquiry. This brief contribution explores how this and subsequent transformations took place. Politics, disciplinary knowledge, curriculum theory, and advocacy for teacher autonomy and professionalism combine here, to offer possible ways for others to bring their own agendas to bear in this space. I have tried to demonstrate how “curriculum” as concept is much more, and much more complicated, than a set of documents such as Australia’s national curriculum. For me, this is at the heart of curriculum inquiry.

Attempting to define “curriculum” begins on the racetrack, with the Latin currere, or course to be run (Ainsworth, 2011, p. 31). On this predetermined track, planned by whoever is in charge, students are addressed as athletes or horses, trained and groomed for success. The course has a clear beginning and end, with an identical destination for all. Competition is the process, and winning is the goal. These metaphors fail to acknowledge that “curriculum” itself is a contested term—that any coalescence around what curriculum is simultaneously conjures what it is not. This awareness has had no place in current Australian’s national curriculum documents over the last decade. Similarly absent is any reflective or critical sense of how masculinist these driving, competitive metaphors for curriculum are.

In contrast, as my work has evolved, I have sought ways to think about curriculum that unsettle neoliberal discourses and counter the masculinist, monologic impulse driving the national curriculum, looking for definitions that rearticulate personal histories and the professional work of curriculum design. The following account gives a sense of the reading I undertook that provided resources for blurring the sharp borders of the racetrack.

I have found it generative to think of curriculum as a selection from culture implemented through discourse and conversation (McKernan, 2008): as “enveloping patterns of norms, endeavours and values” (Joseph 2012, p. 19) and as the telling and retelling of stories that reconstitute the past and imagine the future (Connelly & Clandinin, 1988). Greene also recognizes autobiography and identity in curriculum (1992) while Grumet imagines it as “tentative and provisional, a temporary and negotiated settlement between the lives we are capable of living and the ones we have” (1988, p. xiii). Gunther Kress similarly looks ahead, with his “design for a future human subject, a future citizen and through them, for a future society” (1995, p. 14).

Some theorists foreground the addressivity of “curriculum,” the awareness that curriculum resides, in the words of Barnes, in “the communicative life of an institution” (1992, p. 14). Barnes sees curriculum as a form of communication, rather than an edict. Applebee’s Curriculum as Conversation (1996) explores this is in depth, while Pinar describes curriculum as “the complicated conversation” about what we need to know (2011, p. 2). For my PhD studies, this enabled me to perceive my collaboration with teachers as dialogic and emerging from our meetings and discussions, not the basis of them.

Curriculum might also be the story to be told by a teacher storyteller, invented in the telling (Boomer, 1988); it may be arousal, inspiration, the questioning of authority, and a search for complexity (Marsh, 2009) or a rewriting of the national consciousness, a creation “out of myths of origin, achievement and destiny” (Bernstein 2000, p. 13).

In contrast to the absence of any detailed definition of curriculum in the Australian national curriculum, in working with Australian teachers, I have drawn on the theorists above selectively; I acknowledge my own attempts at definition as a work in progress, and part of ongoing inquiry, in which I have sought to marry this theory to practical, concrete everyday experiences, whether designing with teachers in a school, or with colleagues in tertiary education.

Through my reading and research, I initially developed an understanding of curriculum as follows:

a conversation about past, present and future, selectively and discursively constructed through story in social contexts, by which we seek to produce or reproduce culture.

This definition grounds curriculum in human interaction, encompassing both myth (past) and desire (future). Curriculum as conversation also incorporates pedagogy, rather than envisaging it as a separate toolkit for achieving outcomes; pedagogy is also “an act of cultural production, [a] form of ‘writing’…” (Giroux, 1994, p. 132). This definition makes the work of the teacher in creating and enacting pedagogy central to the conversation; Pinar sees this as a political necessity where teachers are reduced to devices for the fascistic transmission of knowledge (2011).

The discourses present in this curricular conversation are understood as both creating and being created by participants, by particular gendered, raced, and classed subjectivities in an unstable and iterative process (Butler, 2007). By discourses, I mean “practices that systematically form the object of which they speak” (Foucault, 1989, p. 49). Discourses offer us subject positions or ways of being, and through the process of subjectification, we negotiate these positions, which are themselves being continually reconstituted (Butler, 2007; Foucault, 1989). Subjectivity is therefore inherently unstable (Weedon, 1997), and identity is produced through discursive struggle (Bakhtin, 1981). This is a particular, poststructuralist view of identity formation that I hoped might challenge the fixity of subject positions offered by the national curriculum.

I have understood ideology as central to curriculum and as the “significations/constructions of reality… that serve to establish or sustain, in specific circumstances, relations of dominance” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 87), though not necessarily successfully; power does not reside solely with the interpellator, but instead is understood to be fluid and shifting, incorporating resistance in a web of relations (Foucault, 1981). Language, in the form of discourse, is the site of struggle where the enactment of ideology is attempted, where these constructions of reality, and their associated subject positions, are formed. Working with these understandings, curriculum offers a means by which the social institutions of government and school present teachers and students with ways of being, as an ideological and inevitably gendered and raced intervention in shaping identity.

Curriculum seeks to interpellate (Althusser, 1971; Butler, 1997) or to constitute subjects through a particular form of address, yet also contains the possibility for challenging what it seeks to cement. Elizabeth Ellsworth describes pedagogy’s mode of address as “aimed precisely at shaping, anticipating, meeting or changing who a student thinks she is” (1997, p. 7). Yet this was not explicitly or reflexively examined in the development of the national curriculum; the desire to write into this space and to consider how curriculum might always be ideologically oriented, always attempting to impose relations of power, has been a key motivation for my work. I have asked how curriculum teaches and performs how to be properly masculine or feminine at a particular age and in a particular context (Golden, 1996). This assumes boys and girls, rather than being unitary categories in a binary gender imaginary, are created discursively “at the intersections of multiple positionings” (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 40), where they become inscribed as “masculine” and “feminine.”

The economic, nation-building goals of the national curriculum do not countenance an unstable subject, whether in relation to teacher or student. In contrast, I sought to explore how we are multiply addressed even as we seek to address others, and also how we might struggle to resist or exceed interpellation, in the work of curriculum design. To achieve this, I developed the spectral figure of the “phallic teacher” (McKnight, 2016) who must comply to be considered professional.

Yet all of the above has been called into question through my more recent reading of posthumanist and new materialist theory (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013, 2019). The strong feminist message I have gained from this work is that poststructuralist notions of discourse and subjectivity and humanist concepts of story and conversation fail to imagine a future for the planet. To focus on the human and on discourse is to ignore the material, at our peril. The discourse/materiality and human/nature binaries so integral to more traditional curriculum design are exhausted in and inadequate for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Fourth Great Extinction.

So instead of thinking of curriculum as designing plans for future human subjects (Kress, 1995), it needs to design a future for all, human and more than human. As a result, I have rethought curriculum as conversation and interpellation to involve more than just people (McKnight, 2021). Certainly, the racetrack as a metaphor for curriculum, with its human triumphalism, cannot suffice for a world in which dominant White, Western/Northern, masculinist, and capitalist human-driven forces have ultimately created ecological chaos.

This contribution takes the reader on a round-about journey that gives a sense of my own reading journey in curriculum and the struggles along the way. What emerges for me is how important these contested concepts of pedagogy and curriculum are, as the key elements of our discipline of education. These are educators’ specific areas of professional expertise, insight, and creativity; designing curriculum and pedagogy is our superpower. We must continue to use, develop, and evolve this superpower, in the face of behaviorist scripted curriculum or, in my field, structured literacy, “innovations” which again position students on that pre-defined racetrack. As with feminist gains in broader society, this challenging of the curriculum-as-racetrack metaphor has to happen over and over again, to imagine more diverse and rewarding futures for education.