Conference Agenda

Curriculum studies as a field has gone through successive crises of identity, from the assertion by Schwab in 1970s that the field was moribund, to talk of the field being in crisis (Wheelahan 2010) to a call from Priestley and Philippou (2019) to put curriculum at the heart of educational practice. Various agendas are being promoted by the European Union and other political or economic bodies such key competences, calls for democratic/ civic education, the promotion of education for sustainability, the inclusion/equity/ diversity conversations; these all involve questions of politics and power. The curriculum is being asked to be agile and respond to multiple “masters” at once.

EU’s ‘Key competences for lifelong learning’ as a condition for curriculum revision in Cyprus: challenging disciplinarity? Stavroula Philippou

New curricula in Cyprus introduced in 2010, restructured into ‘success and efficiency indicators’ in 2016 and are undergoing an ‘update’ [epikairopoiisi] in 2024; part of the guidelines of the Ministry during this more recent revision has been for curriculum groups to consider how the eight key competences set out by the EU’s Reference Framework (2006) can inform the process horizontally. Drawing on debates around the nature and position of ‘knowledge’ in curricula (e.g. Biesta, 2014; Deng, 2021; McPhail & Rata, 2016; Zipin, Fataar & Brennan, 2015), the paper discusses the institutional processes through which these competences were given as a condition for curriculum revision, in relation to existing curriculum policies and practices which have traditionally favoured strong boundaries between subject-areas in Cyprus.

A quest for the holy grail: The problems and possibilities of ’knowledge’ in VET curricula. Daniel Alvunger

A question in discussions on vocational education and training (VET) programmes is how they are designed to in the best possible ways respond to the lack of skilled and educated staff (Panican, 2020; Wheelahan, 2015). At the same time, VET programmes are located in a borderland between school and work life. On the one hand, they shall contribute to competence and labour provision (Panican & Paul, 2019), while they on the other side are expected, like all upper secondary education programmes, to promote the possibility of the young to independently shape their lives (Rosvall & Nylund, 2022). The presentation relates to recent changes in the VET curriculum from 2022 and an upcoming extensive assessment and grading reform for upper secondary education.

A [re]turn to knowledge in post-competency curricula? Panel speaker 3: Mark Priestley

Contemporary debates in curriculum studies have elicited controversy around the centrality of knowledge in the school curriculum (e.g. Young & Muller, 2010; Rata, 2012). These debates have often been framed in terms of a dichotomy: competency-based curriculum on the one hand, or a so-called knowledge rich approach on the other. Such polarization can obscure the complexities that lie behind the construction of curricular policy. In this presentation, I draw attention to some of the trajectories and discourses that have characterized this apparent shift in emphasis, questioning whether CfE can, in its present form, address such a challenge.

Artificial Intelligence and the new episteme; implications for curriculum. Anne Looney

Debates about the implications of AI for education have focused for the most part on assessment and testing, with consideration of the implications for curriculum confined to discussions of courses in AI. School curricula (however articulated), claim to offer students access to the foundations of disciplinary knowledge, mediated by teachers as curriculum-makers. I consider whether this claim continues to be valid in the age of generative AI and whether the traditional curriculum tensions between skills and knowledge have been made more complex by emerging tensions between the ‘teacher generated’ and the ‘artificially generated’ in classrooms.