Product reviews for A Curious Curriculum

In the context of the current discourse on curriculum, we finally have a book of balance that needs to be read as a complete narrative on what it is to design, teach and receive a nourishing curriculum – where educators understand the power and importance of their choices. This book is an expert story that weaves the ‘why’ of values and ideology, the complexity of ‘how’ to organise learning in any school, alongside the ‘what’ in making those choices about children's formal and informal education, ensuring connection with their drive to learn. It also has extensive referencing to some of the world's best educational evidence and research, both from the past and using current thinking, and it weaves the research into the classroom and school narrative as lodestones for curriculum design.

The book is both a passionate and highly practical treatise on curriculum that, for me, inspires the sense of education being about equity and growth in schools – for everybody. It makes it clear and audible that children and young people are entitled to a curriculum that ensures tasks and experiences are designed to support and challenge their intellectual growth and emotional needs and interests. It recounts a story of involving educators making many wise choices: choices about a variety of pedagogic approaches such as instructional teaching, enquiry-based teaching, design-based learning, teacher-directed and child-initiated learning, as well as choices about the content of the curriculum – what to teach and what not to – and the productive use of time, resources and space. The education community needs the balanced wisdom in this book and the sense of agency it gives to schools and teachers in doing the right kind of thinking for their children and their communities.

Thank you to Claire and Mick for putting the complex into tangible words of experience, knowledge and good judgement.