ABSTRACT
School-based change is a contradictory process to the official rhetoric of reform and is guided by different justifications and expectations. A school-based reform process is developed in the context of collaboration between teachers and partners from schools, universities or other educational institutions. Planning of curricular innovation through a partnership is a complex process of meaning-making between actors from multiple communities, which requires consideration of necessary conditions and complex epistemic resources for justification. Deliberative partnership in teacher professional development is an intellectually and morally responsive political practice that requires “the formation of a new public and new means of communication among its constituent members”. The model of deliberative democracy seems to be a special case of classification that does not fit usual distinctions of direct or participatory democracy on the one side and liberal or representative democracy on the other. Deliberation in the curriculum is a complex, relational and epistemic process between partners for shared meaning-making.
