ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the question 'Where is the curriculum created?' and considers the range of social, political, and cultural factors that impact on the curriculum making process. It attempts to raise some important questions about the nature of the school curriculum, with a particular focus on school geography. The chapter takes curriculum as a highly significant idea and discusses some of the key influences on how this idea has emerged and developed. It explores some of the consequences of curriculum thinking for teachers and students studying geography. Lambert and Morgan contend that the school curriculum is 'a human creation' serving a range of needs and purposes, reflecting and responding to changes in wider society. The chapter considers a model that resonates with more recent approaches to curriculum change at a national level. Curriculum planning and development in the 1970s and 1980s was characterised by notions of collaboration and cooperation – between teachers, schools, educational infrastructures and the academy.
