Early career teachers’ curriculum realities: implications of school context on a continuum of curriculum-making possibilities

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ABSTRACT Ongoing performativity agendas are narrowing the scope of teachers’ curriculum decision-making, challenging notions of curriculum as a process dependent on teachers’ professional judgement. As such, curriculum is positioned as a product, and teachers’ curriculum work merely as a routine, standardized practice. In this paper, we explore Australian early career primary teachers’ curriculum-making experiences within this educational landscape, focusing on their reported accounts from professional experience placements as preservice teachers and their first year of classroom teaching. A longitudinal multiple case study design is adopted, collecting data from semi-structured interviews with participants across two research phases between 2021 and 2022. Drawing on Bourdieuian thinking tools of field, habitus and doxa, we outline a continuum of early career teachers’ curriculum-making experiences and highlight specific contextual conditions within schools that shape these teachers’ experiences and their development of curriculum-making capabilities. We argue that attention should be placed on enabling school contexts that promote teachers’ engagement in process-oriented forms of curriculum-making. In so doing, strengthening teachers’ own positioning and aspirations as curriculum-makers, not deliverers, and empowering them to re-claim their expertise in curriculum. Further research is needed that deepens understanding of the contextual conditions shaping early career teachers’ curriculum identities and capabilities.