Conference Agenda

In recent years, many countries across the world have embarked on a quest to reinvent their national curricula, reflecting the global trend of policy-borrowing (Ball, 2016; Sinnema and Aitken, 2013). While these curricula retain unique characteristics, there are a number of commonalities that these reforms have been shown to share, viz. the emphasis on 21^st century skills, student-centred learning, and a greater emphasis on pedagogical approaches that are believed to improve student performance and granting teachers a more devolved role in curriculum-making. This study will focus on this latter aspect of curriculum reform, specifically the effect of these reforms on teacher agency (Priestley & Biesta, 2013).

The most recent major iteration of curriculum reform within the state of Georgia has been structured and implemented with a specific emphasis on these particular areas, which is an unprecedented occurrence in the history of education in this country (Silagadze, 2019; Li et al., 2019; Djakeli, 2019). Since Georgia is treading in uncharted waters with these changes, it remains uncertain as to the effects these structural shifts are having on the teaching profession and the extent to which they are fulfilling one of their stated objectives of enhancing teacher’s role in curriculum-making. This study aims to provide an in-depth evaluation of the ways in which the ongoing re-structurisation of the Georgian National Curriculum for Primary and Secondary schools enable or constrain teachers as curricular agents.

The central research question the thesis intends to answer is the following: Do the recent changes in the Georgian National Curriculum enable or constrain teacher agency?

The study also aims to answer the following subsidiary research questions:

- How does curriculum-making take place across different institutional sites in Georgia (from macro to nano)?

- How is teacher agency articulated in Georgia’s National Curriculum and associated texts?

- How do teachers perceive and exercise their agency in the classroom within the frames of the new National Curriculum?

- Overall, do the recent changes in the Georgian National Curriculum enable or constrain teacher agency?

The study will draw upon the conceptual lens developed by Priestley and Philippou (2018, p. 154) that regards curriculum-making as a complex series of processes taking place across multiple sites that intersect and interact with one another in ‘unpredictable and context-specific ways’, often leading to differential practices and realities ‘wherein power flows in non-linear ways, thus blurring boundaries between these multiple sites.’

This will enable a systemic understanding of curriculum-making as dynamic interactions ranging from individual pupils and teachers (nano) to the international layer (supra). Further, this conceptual framework will enable an in-depth examination of how different actors interact across multiple sites with a particular focus on teachers as curriculum makers and therefore as agentic practitioners within the context of the new National Curriculum. The study will rely on the ecological model of teacher agency consisting of three core dimensions: Iterational, projective and practical-evaluative (Biesta et al. 2015). The three-dimensional model will facilitate an understanding of how teacher agency is enabled and/or constrained by cultural, structural and material sources available in multiple sites of curriculum-making in Georgia. Further, the ecological approach to teacher agency will enable to explore how teachers interpret and execute the new curriculum in ways that may contradict policy goals, and if such actions result in a discrepancy between intended and actual outcomes, as well as unforeseen consequences.

With increasingly diverse international student profiles, higher education is challenged to enable educational relationships amidst complexity and intersectionality. The purpose of education in contemporary society has received concerted attention (Biesta, 2008, Deng, 2022, Noddings, 2013), focusing on human development and the expansion of both individual and collective capabilities. The question of how these “different combinations of human functionings by people, groups or both” (Deng, 2021: 1662) can be supported by curriculum is answered by a diverse range of voices, some cohering, many contesting.

Set against this increasingly global but contested curriculum landscape, this paper presents a re-envisioned interpretation of curriculum as encounter to examine how student collegiality as a peer-to-peer engagement process can be supported in undergraduate business programmes. Collegiality is recognised as one of the most enduring foundational premises of higher education (Burnes et al., 2014, Fielding, 1999) and espoused as a core value by academic professionals (Macfarlane, 2016). Despite widespread recognition of its importance, a lack of definitional clarity in extant literature remains, which in combination with the use of collegiality to cover a wide range of meanings and interpretations results in an almost mythical quality to the concept (Scoles et al., 2021).

This research extends Fielding’s (1999) radical collegiality as a communal educational practice linked to the development of democracy, thwarting traditional power relations where students are partners, not objects in their learning process. Curriculum as encounter thus provides a theoretical framework built on Greene’s (1993) observation that curriculum always emerges from the interplay between “conceptions of knowledge, conceptions of human beings and conceptions of social order”. Encounters imply conversations, complicated by many factors of the contextuality of time and place, individuality, prior knowledge, and interest or disinterest, of the respective interlocutors (Pinar, 2011). Reimagining curriculum as a lived experience allows the inclusive power of conversation to bring in previously silenced voices in an evolving way “never reaching a final conclusion, always incomplete, but richer and more densely woven” Greene (1993: 213).

Conceptions of knowledge and questions of why and whose knowledge are valuable remain critical in curriculum development, shaped by multiple influences (Priestley et al., 2021). Encounters offer potential to break with the mundane, to challenge perceived realities and inherent ideological and political influences in hierarchical structures of knowledge. Conceptions of human beings address the abstraction and indifference in curriculum in favour of personalisation to foster diversity and inclusion. The “scholarship of the self”, explained by Style (2014: 67) as students’ “lived experiences, stories and methods of meaning-making”, are integrated with objective academic knowledge through "respectful encounter". The sharing of personal stories and experiences through inner thought and open dialogue can enable deeper understanding and both subjective and social reconstruction (Pinar, 2011). Private and public learning are thus inseparable, where the self is not a fixed, separate, or predefined state but one that is continuously evolving, becoming intersubjective through dialogue and narrative. The individual is inherently linked as part of the collective, an amalgamation of “provinces of meaning” (Greene, 1977: 287). Conceptions of social order form the basis for more democratic education not alone in the recognition of difference but in the confrontation of systemic oppression or stereotyping where true citizenship agency is activated. This reflexive form of collective community that curriculum as encounter engenders, contributes to an always evolving democratic ideal. Encounters between students and curricular content leads to cultivation of capabilities and dispositions (Deng, 2017) while exchange of stories from different perspectives “bring something into being that is in-between” (Greene, 1993: 219). This milieu of interconnecting relationships holds potential to be transformational, a collective sense of becoming not just being, of envisioning the possible.