Why Are We Learning This? The Long Overdue Case for Curriculum Collaboration
This article examines how current curriculum structures present challenges to student engagement and equitable learning outcomes. It argues, using both research and practical experience, that fostering student agency in curriculum design is essential for preparing students for success in higher education, the workforce, and active citizenship. Curriculum acts as an important mediator between education system intentions and student experiences of learning. As such, it can remain a largely colonial, paternalistic document that disables student ownership in their learning. To achieve equitable educational opportunities, student voice must be central in curriculum development. Centring student voice counters historical inequities within education systems, which have often marginalised students from diverse backgrounds and reinforces the need for curricula and teaching practices that are inclusive of, and relevant to, all learners.
(Source: Mitra 2018)
Hopwood (2024) and Mitra (2018) have been most influential in grounding my perceptions of student voice. One of the challenges we face with using the term ‘student voice’ is the lack of action we see emerge from mere consultation and how often our mechanisms in schools – such as student representative councils – so rarely ‘represent’ the true diversity of student identities and perspectives. Mitra’s (2018) pyramid of student voice (see below) highlights the importance of levels or a continuum of student voice, as she highlights:
‘The higher a group moves on the pyramid of student voice, the greater the leadership of students and the greater the benefit for youth. The more students can assume agency in the initiatives, the more opportunities they have to learn and to grow. The narrowing of the pyramid indicates that the greater the agency and leadership of youth in an organisation, the harder it is to maintain because the group must continually push against counter-normative forces that define the traditional roles of students and teachers.’ (Mitra 2018, pp.473-4)
Hopwood (2024) highlights how this agency is inherently a co-creating process, which given curriculum policy has become increasingly removed from the classroom, it can unintentionally (or intentionally) set a ceiling on teachers’ and students’ voices. Hopwood (2024) discusses the work of Stetsenko (2020) to beautifully capture that agency involves what people strive for, a commitment to bringing that future into reality and the challenge it poses as an inherently disruptive process.
My Student Voice Journey – from High School Student to Teacher of Students
I began my teaching journey as a Year 10 student who really enjoyed helping my peers. I still remember helping one of my good friends in Year 7 Maths – a time when I consistently got 90% and would be disappointed in myself if it were lower. However, by Year 10 I was mostly failing in-class tests as I saw no career in Maths and accepted the reality, I would be dropping the subject in Year 11. It was my careers advisor who recommended the NSW Teach scholarship because I only wanted to teach where no one wanted to go and someone with my marks would have no problem – my ATAR of 91.45 was a reflection of someone who chose the subjects he loved so the work was always personally interesting and motivating. This seemingly contradictory high school journey encapsulates a few issues this article will raise:
How often a system can get students wrong – I received multiple first, second and third place awards in Year 11 to the surprise of many teachers as I walked past them. We now know well the role that autonomy plays in intrinsic motivation for all students – see Self Determination Theory (Ryan and Deci, 2017).
How common it is for students to begin disengaging with their learning into high school. Educators widely acknowledge the challenge of engaging students in Years 9 and 10. While puberty plays a role, research indicates that a lack of curriculum relevance to students' lives and future aspirations is a significant contributing factor to disengagement. This disengagement not only hinders academic outcomes but also diminishes students' development of essential skills for post-secondary success and workforce readiness.
How much curriculum choice and relevance impact intrinsic motivation, particularly in an era of infinite knowledge and almost universal access to it via the internet.
Ironically, as a naïve 18-year-old who loved History and English because they taught us so much about ourselves and society, going into teaching I thought: "Who couldn't find these subjects relevant?"
The lens of equity trickled doubts into my mind in that first year of university. We looked at the representations of teachers in the media – movies like Freedom Writers, Dead Poet's Society and Dangerous Minds – that painted a problematic habit of white, middleclass idealists coming into 'disadvantaged' communities to 'inspire' those with less culture into the dominant culture. Unwittingly, I went into teaching to 'save' these poor kids but quickly became critical of my own English study at Sydney University – feeling it was not extending me any further than Extension English did, and my hard-earned Western Sydney upbringing was paying someone's salary for what felt like a self-indulgent exploration of a lecturer's glorified book club. These doubts mirrored many of the voices I would experience throughout teaching Shakespeare (and many other topics) to teenagers who would complain, "why are we learning this?" … "When the hell am I going to use this shit?"
I think many teachers hear these complaints and have few options for how to process them:
Ignore them and presume that "sometimes school just isn't for those kids";
Take it personally as a sign that you aren't teaching well and try desperately to make the learning relevant;
Empathize with students and try to explain that sometimes we just "have to learn or do things we don't want to do in life."
For a young teacher, I chose number 2, but underneath it all I always felt empathy for them. Our politicians, parents and even school leaders can often make young teachers feel that they are the problem for disengagement. Decades of discourse in the media about 'quality teachers' (Mockler, 2024) understandably has gaslit many of us to blame ourselves for any 'failure' of students. However, it never sat well with me to respond with the assumption that those with the most to gain or lose in the system should just accept things they don't want to learn. Equally, as that kid who was defiant, alongside several working class stepbrothers that didn't ‘buy what the curriculum was selling’ either I could see it was unfair to put all this on teachers.
I give this back story to show the seeds of my teaching and research journey. This is because student voice is inherently intertwined with the teacher's experiences, students and policy. When curriculum is so standardised and centralised, it can become impossible for it to meet the needs, interests and aspirations of all students – whether with First Nations, migrant, neurodivergent or working class identities. This is the importance of an equity critical lens for curriculum design, especially at a state-wide level where diverse student identities are as inevitable as are the diversity of their aspirations and needs of their communities.
My master’s dissertation explored the opportunities for student voice, choice and leadership within the NSW 7-10 syllabus documents of English, Maths, History and Science. Using a mixture of content and critical policy discourse analysis, I wanted to understand how much choice and voice students had in the curriculum. I felt the need to develop the term 'interpretive flexibility' - the power for teachers to flexibly interpret in curriculum language opportunities for choice in their practice – to explain 'to what degree' could we see these dot points as mandatory or flexible on a scale of student agency. As an English teacher, I'm aware there is flexibility to interpret what pedagogical choices we make and if we can in fact 'hand over the learning' to students. However, outside of a mandatory student project in the Science syllabus (in Stage 5), and the potential for an elective topic option in History (in Stage 5, something I've only ever seen done in one of the schools I have ever taught in, though not developed with students), there was no real student agency. Even if there was a degree of flexibility for the teacher to interpret choice or freedom for students, ultimately the syllabus defined all of the outcomes. Essentially, when all of the outcomes are pre-determined and there is no invitation for students to decide their outcomes – or 'goals', the term I prefer outside the Neoliberal discourse of 'input-outcome' - then we cannot pretend the curriculum is inviting of the students who are most to 'consume' it.
I have now taught pre-service teachers for at least four years and they often show the seeds of my own journey – an ideal desire to just help all young people be the best version of themselves, but a stifling reality that in a system so pre-determined in its outcomes and content they will spend more time being compliance officers than teachers... and for me, as I think for many young teachers, it’s the reason why I left and have no intention of returning to classrooms.
Pre-Determined Outcomes in an Uncertain Future for Unique Individuals
In a world where students can learn whatever they like with the device in their pockets, schools and teachers have a much harder time justifying what is dictated by the curriculum. The work of Ditchburn (2012; 2015) is the only significant critical policy analysis of the Australian curriculum – a document that is arguably more friendly to students than its NSW counterparts. Ditchburn (2012) described the document as conservative, prescriptive and top-down – the latter two I have felt in 10 years of teaching in NSW. The later critiques (Ditchburn, 2015, pp.34-7) described the History syllabus within the Australian curriculum as equally prescriptive, treating knowledge as singular and defined, rather than multiple and contested, while creating a checklist of content items that teachers need to 'tick off'. In my own experience across a variety of schools, this was evident in every faculty – the syllabus a designated 'tick a box' for teachers to deliver into presumably passive, compliant students. What I often have termed to colleagues 'death by dot point' teaching.
This reality is even more concerning in the NSW context in light of Filatov's (2024) recent historical policy analysis of school-developed elective courses. Her research begins with a similarly optimistic experience to my own – highlighting the collaborative designing of an Applied Philosophy elective done with their science teacher colleague (Filtov, 2024, p.199) for year 9-10 students. This English-Science collaboration Filatov (2024, p.199) describes as:
'This was one of the most rewarding professional experiences of my teaching career... The feedback from our students and parents confirmed that experiences in the course brought a great deal of value to students' personal development and confidence, as well as having positive effects on their overall academic performance.'
However, such courses will not be endorsed by the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) as school-developed electives from 2022 onwards will not be recognised in students' Record of Academic Achievement (ROSA) that is used for continuing onto tertiary pathways (Filatov, 2024). This re-centralisation process has gone so far as to effectively tell teachers, you may still create these courses, but they will never be on our official academic records... it will be as if they never happened. Filatov (2024, p.208) highlights the wiping clean of professional development providers by NESA is equally concerning and mirrors this government overreach for who decides what is ‘official’ curriculum and ‘who’ gets to write it. I distinctly remember this policy as I was in the early days of an education start-up liaising with the Professional Teachers Council during the chaos. Within a day, NESA deregistered hundreds of courses, many of which had been designed and developed over time by actual teachers with years, likely decades of experience, with no warning. NESA cites on their website that students are involved in curriculum consultation. Which students? How many? Where they are from? How and at what point are they involved? To what extent? All of these questions seem unsurprisingly unclear.
Cirriculum Collaboration – Partnership as Deficit in Policy
My research uncovered no mentioning of agentic terms in any of the syllabus documents, such as:
Student choice
Student voice
Co-design
Student goal/s
Co-planning or planning with students
Collaborate
Related terms to the above list are rarely mentioned (from 1-4 times); they may be encouraged but never mandated beyond the Science student project. Even the latter had its limits. It must be said, there is a new syllabus and while I've not had the opportunity to explore it in these details, even a cursory survey found similar results (and the uproar of teachers in the Arts disciplines over the last year would suggest that their own agency is increasingly being encroached upon).
Perhaps the most startling and concerning finding from the analysis that appears still present is NESA's definition for 'collaborative curriculum planning':
Collaborative curriculum planning is the process to determine the most appropriate curriculum options and adjustments for a student with disability
Collaborative curriculum planning should take place within the broader context of personalised planning that includes interventions and other supports to address identified student learning and support needs.
This involves a team who has significant knowledge and understanding of the student. The team comprises parents/carers, teachers and other significant individuals in the student’s life. It also includes the students themselves.
Collaborative Curriculum Planning is clearly defined only in light of accessibility and disability - i.e. only students who appear unable to access any syllabus content should have say in collaborative planning of their learning. The implication is grossly paternalistic and infantilising: the syllabus is an unquestionably perfect document and if you aren't able to access it, we will help you with other adults see which parts of it you can achieve. Moreover, collaboration on curriculum planning (or your learning pathway that will set you up for your life) is not only not for every student, but it is only for those who need even more monitoring and support to learn.
The Case for Change in Policy and Practice
Anecdotally, I have asked the question to young people and current students: Would you like to have more say or would you find school more enjoyable if you had more choice in what you got to learn about? The answer is always, yes. A resounding, almost stupidly obvious, yes. A variety of meta-analysis on motivation and student-teacher relationships prove this point even further:
Su and Reeve's (2011) meta-analysis of 19 studies on the effectiveness of intervention programs designed to support autonomy highlights that teacher-autonomy supportive practice where 'students...pursue their interests, study to satisfy their curiosity, and volitionally engage themselves in schoolwork' (p.160) depend on offering choice and using non-controlling language in order to create student autonomy.
Vasconcellos' (et al., 2020, p.1457) later meta-analysis of self-determination theory applied to Physical Education reiterated these characteristics, stating “students will experience autonomy when they perceive an environment where they can perform tasks without feeling pressured, where the teacher welcomes students' thoughts, feelings and actions, rely on noncontrolling language, and where exploratory rationale is given so the content is seen as meaningful to their lives.”
These studies alone highlight the importance of both policy and practice that needs to change in order for students to find more meaning, motivation and relevance in their learning. We now have overwhelming evidence of the positive impacts of student agency in learning from other meta-analyses:
Howard's (et al., 2021) meta-analysis of 344 samples (223,209 participants) cemented that autonomy support improves student motivation, while likely correlating with improved relationships between teachers and students, which creates a positive feedback loop for better student outcomes.
Okada's (2018, as cited in 2021) meta-analysis revealed further teacher autonomy support improved academic performance, intrinsic motivation and academic engagement for both elementary and high school students.
Bureau (et al., 2022) conducted a meta-analysis that reviewed over 144 studies (including more than 79,000 students) and revealed that autonomy supports were more significant than parents influence, particularly as they get older, on similarly positive outcomes related to motivation and students' relationship with school.
In an era where students are immersed in a world of on-demand content and personalised experiences via the internet, the traditional curriculum's lack of relevance can lead to student questioning and disengagement. To maintain education's relevance, curricula must adapt to reflect the digital age, fostering critical thinking, digital literacy, and the ability to navigate and utilise information effectively – skills essential for both civic engagement and the 21st-century workforce.
One of the most stifling oversights in my research journey has genuinely been the fact that the term 'the Internet' is almost never to be found. Anywhere. AI has slapped us in the face to replace our jobs and undermine our assessments, but the wake-up call actually began with the internet. It's as if the education system has been sleeping through multiple alarms and it has woken up hours late for work to see AI take their jobs, forcing them to ask deeper questions about the purpose of schools that should have been discussed with the invention of the internet. Curriculum, assessment, teaching and student engagement research appears to ignore the elephant in the room – the fact that the internet profoundly changed their relevance, and the system has not adjusted to the reality of its presence.
The Power of Partnership and Personalisation in Policy
So, where to from here for teachers, policymakers and the students they serve? Students need to be at the table and partners in learning, but at a systemic level there are multiple changes necessary for this to move beyond tokenistic 'consultation.' My suggestions below may be a starting point to better invite students into this space, even if they can't physically be at the table:
Modernise Curriculum Language: Revise curriculum documents to incorporate student-centred language that promotes agency, choice, and co-design. This will foster a sense of ownership and relevance among learners.
Increase Teacher and Student Agency: Grant educators’ greater autonomy in curriculum contextualisation and empower students with more choice in learning pathways. This will personalise learning and better meet diverse student needs and aspirations, ultimately improving student outcomes.
Integrate Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment: Reform assessment practices to align with curriculum goals and teaching methodologies. Emphasise authentic assessment that measures critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration—skills essential for success in higher education and the workforce.
Allocate Time for Co-Design: Mandate dedicated time within the curriculum for collaborative planning and co-design between teachers and students. This will ensure that student voice is embedded in the learning process and that curricula are responsive to student interests and needs.
Prioritise Relevant Knowledge and Skills: Re-evaluate curriculum content to prioritise knowledge and skills that are relevant to students' lives and future aspirations. Emphasise critical thinking, digital literacy, and collaboration, ensuring students are equipped for success in a rapidly changing world.
In the few experiences where I’ve had the freedom to provide students with choice in their learning within secondary contexts, I have seen nothing but positive reactions. The harnessing of students’ curiosities brings a joy back into the classroom too often lost in today’s standardised contexts. Since teaching at university, I often have far more autonomy in my practice and my pre-service teachers benefit from my own openness to adjust the learning to their concerns and interests. Some of the feedback I’ve received in the last four years just highlights this support:
‘Grant listens closely and pays attention to each individual student. He respects everyone’s background and scheme and uses it to craft truly unique tutorials.’ - third year education student, 2022
‘He gives us freedom and space but also guidance, so we don’t feel restrictive and micromanaged but instead free to explore and learn together.’ - third year education student, 2022
‘Grant was always allowing for differentiation in classes to account for each student’s different perspectives, knowledges and experiences and allowed for us to express these in our tutorial activities. - second year education student, 2023
‘Grant would actively listen to our opinions and answers and build upon those with external tips and stories outside of the learning material.’ - fourth year education student, 2024
The challenges are complex and run deeply into the perspective of stakeholders, the purpose of schooling, the role of teachers and the changing of practice. However, the above suggestions not only could help empower students, but cultivate better relationships between teachers and students that could simultaneously improve student outcomes while reducing the burnout of teachers. But I hope my journey shares the echoes of many students' voices who are tired of compliance in an outdated system when the solutions have been in our hands (literally for students) for many years. If only we were not so afraid to be open to adopting them.
Reference List:
Bureau, J. S., Howard, J. L., Chong, J. X. Y. & Guay, F. (2022). Pathways to Student Motivation: A Meta-Analysis of Antecedents of Autonomous and Controlled Motivations. Review of Educational Research, 92(1), 46–72. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211042426
Ditchburn, G.M. (2012) The Australian curriculum: finding the hidden narrative? Critical Studies in Education, 53(3), 347-360, DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2012.703137
Ditchburn, G. (2015) The Australian Curriculum: History – the challenges of a thin curriculum?, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(1), 27-41, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2013.829657
Filatov, K. (2024). The demise of school-developed elective courses in NSW: a case study in centralisation. History of Education Review, 53(3), 199–212. https://doi.org/10.1108/HER-05-2024-0026
Hopwood, N. (2024). Conceptualising praxis, agency and learning: A postabyssal exploration to strengthen the struggle over alternative futures. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 56(10), 956–966. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2024.2333851
Howard, J. L., Bureau, J., Guay, F., Chong, J. X. Y. & Ryan, R. M. (2021). Student Motivation and Associated Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis From Self-Determination Theory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 16(6), 1300–1323. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620966789
Mitra, D. (2018). Student voice in secondary schools: the possibility for deeper change. Journal of Educational Administration, 56(5), 473–487. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEA-01-2018-0007
Mockler, N. (2024). Accounting for teachers: changing representations of education in The Australian Financial Review 1993–2022. Educational Review, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2024.2362171
Okada, R. (2018). Effects of teachers’ autonomy support: A meta-analysis. Memoirs of the Faculty of Education, Kagawa University. Part I,150,31–50. (In Japanese.)
Okada, R. (2021). Effects of Perceived Autonomy Support on Academic Achievement and Motivation Among Higher Education Students: A Meta‐Analysis. Japanese Psychological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/jpr.12380
Ryan, R. M. & Deci, E. L. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Gilford Press.
Stetsenko, A. (2020). Critical challenges in cultural-historical activity theory: The urgency of agency. Cultural-Historical Psychology, 16(2), 5–18. https://doi.org/10.17759/chp.2020160202
Su, Y.-L., & Reeve, J. (2011). A Meta-analysis of the Effectiveness of Intervention Programs Designed to Support Autonomy. Educational Psychology Review, 23(1), 159–188. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-010-9142-7
Vasconcellos, D., Parker, P. D., Hilland, T., Cinelli, R., Owen, K. B., Kapsal, N., Lee, J., Antcsak, D., Ntoumanis, N., Ryan, R. M., & Lonsdale, C. (2020). Self-Determination Theory Applied to Physical Education: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 112(7), 1444–1469. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000420
