Conference Agenda

New Zealand is currently in the middle of what has been described a ‘curriculum war’ (Gomez, 2024). Such curriculum wars are not a new phenomenon (Kliebard, 2004). Nor will they disappear, especially in the context of growing societal polarisation (Sant, 2021).

However, New Zealand’s current curriculum war appears to be particularly highly charged, with diametrically opposed views being advanced by competing political parties and other powerful actors about the national curriculum’s purpose, its ideal form and the knowledge that it should contain. Between 2019 and 2023, a centre-left government began a reform of the curriculum focused on centring indigenous rights, local curriculum making, and concept-led learning (Hughson, 2022). Then, in 2024, a new centre-right government discarded the previous government’s reforms and has instead been constructing a new curriculum focused on disciplinary knowledge, explicit teaching and the removal of much indigenous content (Wood & Hughson, 2025). With a tightly contested general election set for 2026, these different approaches to curriculum remain at loggerheads with each other.

This paper uses the example of New Zealand to analyse the increasing ‘swings’ present in curricula in many jurisdictions (Biesta, 2021; Wood & Hughson, 2025), with a particular focus on the way political polarisation (see Lee & Tipoe, 2025) can reshape curriculum and the knowledge that it contains. Specifically, it addresses two intersecting research questions: “Why has New Zealand’s curriculum landscape become so polarised?” and “what impact has political polarisation had on the nature and form of curriculum content?”.

To answer these questions, it draws on a conceptual framework we have developed of five axes upon which curriculum can ‘swing’ on (Wood & Hughson, 2025). Here we will focus on two axes in particular: the ‘political’ axis of swings between more progressive and more conservative political projects, and the related ‘local-global’ axis of whether a curriculum orients itself more towards the local/the particular or the global/the universal. The political axis is conceptualised in particular in relation to an Althusserian notion of ideology, which understands political ideology as a normative view of the world that “interpellates individuals as subjects” (Althusser, 1971, p. 172) – i.e. it seeks to create certain kinds of individuals or (specifically when thinking about politics) citizens. The local/global axis is thought about in relation both to whether curricula are more concerned with local or global content (i.e. that in students’ immediate vicinity or that in the wider world), but also, drawing on Bernstein (2000), whether conceptualisations of knowledge position it as local and perspectival (Bernstein’s horizontal discourse), or as systematically organised and offering ‘universal truth’ (Bernstein’s vertical discourse) (cf. Smith, 2021).

The insights this paper offers will be highly relevant for both European and global audiences. Political polarisation is acknowledged as a pressing problem globally, with particularly significant manifestations in Europe (Reiljan, 2020). However, as of yet, we lack significant case studies of how this impacts curriculum, and also lack a conceptual toolbox to explore this emerging trend. In closely examining how New Zealand’s ‘curriculum consensus’ (see Hughson, 2022) has fallen apart due to political polarisation and how this has begun to reshape the form of curriculum and the knowledge it contains, this presentation both offers a deep analysis of one particular instance of this phenomenon, while also offering a framework for thinking about it that can be applied to other jurisdictions.

Democracy has long been a central ambition of Nordic schooling, yet the meaning of democracy and the forms of democratic practice expected in classrooms vary significantly across national curricula. This paper examines how democracy is discursively constructed in the curricula of Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, and how these constructions shape expectations for democratic values, practices and subjectivities. The study draws on Dewey’s pragmatism, Englund’s deliberative democratic theory, Biesta’s concept of subjectification and Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism to develop a multi‑perspectival analytical framework capable of capturing the plurality of democratic logics embedded in curriculum texts. Dewey’s understanding of democracy as a communicative mode of associated living highlights how participation and shared experience are foregrounded; Englund’s deliberative model illuminates the emphasis on dialogue, equality and reason‑giving; Biesta’s focus on subjectification draws attention to the ethical and relational dimensions of democratic becoming; and Mouffe’s agonistic theory foregrounds conflict, plurality and the hegemonic struggles that shape democratic orders.

Methodologically, the analysis is informed by Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, operationalised through nodal points, chains of signification, antagonisms, subject positions and discursive logics. The study is designed as a documentary analysis of current preschool and basic education curricula in the four Nordic countries. Democracy was treated as a nodal point, and an initial search for the terms democra and critic (in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish variants) was conducted to identify articulations of democracy and democratic values. These occurrences, together with their contextual and procedural settings, formed the empirical basis for analysis.

Following Narwaya’s (2021) four‑stage analytical procedure, the first stage involved tracing articulations of democracy across the curricula. The second stage focused on identifying subject positions, understood as discursive locations from which democracy is articulated. Across the material, four recurring positions emerged: an abstract authority position defining democracy at a general level; a processual position embodied by the teacher; a child/pupil position; and a participative action position connecting different actors through shared engagement. The third stage centred on identifying antagonisms within each articulation of democracy by tracing the logics of equivalence and difference. This made it possible to examine how hegemonic meanings of democracy are constructed and how they diverge across national contexts. The fourth stage focused on the dynamics of interaction between discourses and the floating signifiers that create spaces of opportunity, acknowledging that no democratic identity can ever be fully constituted.

The findings reveal four distinct democratic imaginaries. In Finland, democracy is articulated through pluralism, rights and sustainability, constructing a democratic subject who is reflective, responsible and capable of acting within an agonistic pluralist order. Norway frames democracy through shared values, tradition and citizenship, producing a value‑anchored, dialogical and morally grounded democratic subject. Denmark emphasises inquiry, standpoint‑taking and action competence, positioning democracy as an active, investigative practice in which students are expected to take responsibility through engagement and decision‑making. Sweden constructs democracy through relational ethics, participation and influence, producing a communicative and relational democratic subject whose agency emerges through ethical encounters with others.

Across the four curricula, antagonisms reveal the boundaries of each democratic project: non‑participation and unsustainability in Finland, intolerance and discrimination in Norway, passivity in Denmark, and exclusion and insecurity in Sweden. These antagonisms stabilise the hegemonic logics that underpin each national discourse. The paper contributes to Nordic curriculum research by demonstrating how different democratic logics, pluralist, value‑community, action‑competence and relational-ethical-shape expectations for democratic practice in schools and structure the democratic subjectivities that education is expected to cultivate.

This study addresses the imperilled public character of the national curriculum by theorising it as an achievement of "mediated publicness." We argue that the publicness of curriculum-making does not derive from models of direct democratic participation (Hopmann, 1999), but from a precarious political and structural achievement we theorise as “mediated publicness”. We rely on Finland as a critical case study to demonstrate how this manifests institutionally in a national context, and point to the processes whereby it’s being systematically dismantled.

This theorisation incorporates the notion of resource withdrawal (after Biesta, 2023), where publicness is materially founded on resources – financial, institutional, professional – diverted from private, sectional circuits and dedicated to collective, intergenerational purposes. This collective and intergenerational responsibility (Shcleiermacher, 1826/2022) emerges from the duty of the older generation to the younger, where curriculum confronts the “natality” of new generations (Arendt, 1958), posing an inherently public question about what to preserve and transform in our shared world. The state doesn’t create this responsibility but must institutionally recognise and stabilise it against the “chance” of domestic and wider societal circumstances.

Through a critical-historical methodology, we genealogically explore curriculum’s emergence as a public concern. We develop this through a structured case study of the Finnish educational system - a trust-based, professionally mediated system that went through its early phases of state- and church-controlled subjection. This historical exploration is coupled with an analysis of the internal vulnerabilities within the very elements forming its “protective shield” that upholds the mediated publicness.

We maintain that the Finnish system’s publicness derives from a series of political settlements that materialises into a three-fold protective shield: the guiding principle of Bildung (Autio, 2021) (oriented towards social justice), a national core curriculum that steers professional collective deliberation, and a teaching profession as a trusted mediator (Välimaa, 2021). Beyond identifying the architecture of this protective shield, our central finding is that commodification operates not merely as an external attack, but by exploiting its internal vulnerabilities.

We challenge the assumption that Finnish public education is resilient to global market forces. We articulate a theoretical vocabulary - “mediated publicness” - to describe the precise architecture of this resilience while revealing its profound precarity. We move beyond descriptive accounts of marketisation to offer a systemic theory of how commodification works, and provide a heuristic framework applicable to other Nordic systems. The central political struggle is no longer just for public funding, but for the de-commodification of public resources themselves