ABSTRACT
The whole, time-honoured machinery of curriculum planning, implementation and evaluation is testament to what seems so compelling and yet so mundane: curriculum as communication. The assumption that curriculum, whether understood as referring to knowledge—specifically to what is taught and learnt in schools and elsewhere—or, more radically, as a distinctive form of educational experience is in some fashion a communicative activity is a relatively common (mis)understanding. An educational philosopher, Gert Biesta writes powerfully of the relationality of education. Within such an emergent framework of understanding, then, the project of 'negotiating the curriculum' was always more than simply a pedagogical strategy but, rather—at least potentially—an important socio-political initiative, opening up the possibility of a more critical-dialogical view of curriculum and schooling and indeed of education and democracy. At the very least, it seems appropriate to consider looking to communication studies as a discipline that education might productively draw on, alongside such established reference points as sociology and psychology.
