Studying curriculum as culture: early childhood policy documents in Greece and New Zealand

ABSTRACT

Curriculum policy and enactment in early childhood education is a political phenomenon that plays out in particular cultural contexts. Comparative lenses to curriculum articulate locally constructed and implicit knowledge to external audiences. In doing so, global commonalities and tensions may become explicit. This paper interrogates curricular documents in Greece and New Zealand using selected questions from Joseph’s (2011a) heuristic of ‘curriculum as culture’. We do this through writing letters to each other that share our local knowledge and experiences and raise further questions. Although New Zealand and Greece are geographically and culturally two worlds apart, their curricular practices share certain discourses and have both been influenced by international trends. We argue that both countries’ documents relate to first-order change where the policy document may not, in itself, update or change prior practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Early childhood education
• comparative
• curriculum
• policy
• context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Birbili

Maria Birbili is an Associate Professor in Early Childhood Education at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She has taught at different levels and in a variety of contexts in Greece and England. Her current research and teaching interests include children’s interests, teacher and student questioning, assessment for learning in early childhood education and concept-based teaching.

Helen Hedges

Helen Hedges is a professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published widely on play-based early childhood curriculum and pedagogy, with a focus on children’s interests, inquiries and working theories (an holistic outcome of Te Whāriki), and decisions teachers make about engaging with these to co-construct curriculum.