ABSTRACT
Introduction By 1977, when I first read An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development , by Lawrence Stenhouse (1975), it had already become a best seller and an Open University set book. As a practising teacher, I had recently embarked on a part-time MA in Curriculum Studies, so, as students do, I annotated the passages that spoke to me most forcefully. Reading the book again, together with other material from the Stenhouse Archive at the University of East Anglia, 1 I was intrigued to discover how many of the points that struck me as important on first reading remain significant for me today. Whether that says more about my reading than Stenhouse’s writing, I may never know. There are, of course, elements that now seem odd or problematic in ways that I was blind to then. The use of the masculine pronoun throughout would not be acceptable today although it was standard practice at the time. The examples used to illustrate curriculum development are drawn almost exclusively from the secondary sector, and especially from the curricula of elite schools. There is an assumption that curriculum developers – or ‘curriculum workers’ as Stenhouse often called them – are located in universities, rather than in the government agencies of recent history. Indeed, there is very little reference to the role of the state at all because, in the 1970s: ‘teachers have been rather free of policy constraints on the curriculum’ (Stenhouse, 1975: 42). Most remarkably, perhaps, given present experience of the effects of over twenty years of national curriculum and assessment policy, Stenhouse made only slight reference to the driving force of assessment and testing.
