Stirling Network for Curriculum Studies

Since the turn of the millennium, and in response to global educational discourses, many education systems across the world have developed new forms of national curriculum, with an increasing focus on the centrality of the learner, the development of core competencies and the importance of teachers as school-based curriculum developers.

These developments come at a time when the field of curriculum studies has been in decline, in both educational institutions such as schools and colleges (subject to formerly more prescriptive, teacher-proof curricula), and as an academic field of study within universities. This means that new approaches to developing curricular policy and practice are occurring when there is a decline in the system capacity needed to fully maximise new policy intentions.

The Stirling Network for Curriculum Studies aims to bring together curriculum scholars from across the world, practitioners and policymakers and developers, to develop curriculum thinking and foster the development of meaningful curriculum practices.

The Network aims to build understanding and to influence curriculum making across multiple sites of activity within education systems:

• Supra: to enhance understandings of the often contradictory and competing global discourses (e.g. OECD, European Union) that drive and shape curricular policy within and between nation states.
• Macro: to feed into, influence and shape the processes whereby curricular policy is developed within nation states and other educational jurisdictions.
• Meso: to develop fuller understanding of system dynamics in educational jurisdictions, and to help build capacity for system-wide curriculum making that reflects educational purposes.
• Micro: to increase understanding of the processes through which curriculum is translated, operationalised and enacted in schools and other educational institutions and contexts, and to build capacity at this level for curriculum revisioning and development.
• Nano: to understand curriculum as experienced by children, young people and adult learners, and to promote pedagogical practices that take the needs of learners and communities into account.

‌If you are interested in being more involved with the Curriculum Network and/or would like to be added to our mailing list to ensure you receive information and updates as soon as they are available please register.

Since its inception in 2016, the Network has hosted events and undertaken knowledge exchange activities, including the following:

Additionally, Network members have provided consultancy services for a range of national regional and local education agencies, including the Scottish and Welsh Governments, Ireland’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, Education Scotland, the Educational Achievement Service, The Forth Valley and West Lothian Regional Improvement Collaborative, South East Wales and the General Teaching Council for Scotland.

If you are interested in being more involved with the Curriculum Network and/or would like to be added to our mailing list to ensure you receive information and updates as soon as they are available please do so via the link below.