ABSTRACT
This chapter draws attention to a range of issues that would repay closer attention to understand the process of curriculum innovation itself. The school is showered with gifts and benefits, such as advice and curriculum material, but is implicitly expected to 'enter a contract'. The chapter considers problematic the definitions arrived at by trial school teachers. These definitions cover a range of 'preferred meanings' about both the school-based task of working in an integrated studies team, and also the nature of the perceived link with the development project itself. The chapter suggests that in curriculum innovation of the kind under study teachers find themselves in a whole series of social situations that call into question their frameworks of social comparison. Self-evidently a curriculum project is an attempt to manipulate the reference orientations of teachers. The relationship of a curriculum project to its trial schools is a novel social relationship.
