Disrupting Aotearoa New Zealand’s Curricular Consensus: From ‘World-Leading’ Curriculum to Curriculum Refresh 2007–2021

Abstract

This article seeks to explain how Aotearoa New Zealand moved from a consensus that the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) should grant a high degree of autonomy to teachers, to an emerging view that it ought to be more prescriptive about content. To do this, it takes an assemblage approach to policy analysis, understanding policies as constantly evolving ‘bundles’ of divergent components temporarily woven together. The article first explores the complex intermingling of Third Way priorities, knowledge economy discourses, educational progressivism and narratives of ‘harmonious’ biculturalism which constitute the 2007 NZC. It then explores the sustained critique of the NZC from the 2015 parliamentary petition calling for compulsory teaching of the New Zealand Wars, up to the government’s 2021 ‘curriculum refresh’ announcement. It is argued that this ‘refresh’ moves to reassemble the NZC so that it accommodates a series of demands made of it in recent years, including demands the curriculum take a more active role in redressing the impact of colonisation, and demands from both business-aligned groups and academics that the curriculum become more ‘knowledge-led’.