ABSTRACT
Singapore schools are increasingly taking up the challenge of developing curricula that would better respond to the needs and interests of their students (see, for example, Ratnam-Lim, Fernandez & Mardiana, 2014). To support this, the focus of a number of leadership and professional development courses has been introducing curriculum theories in equipping school leaders in these efforts. Through a close examination of two such theories and their assumptions of what schools do, this chapter discusses a number of their significant insights, as well as the extent to which they might also speak to different notions and constructions of schools, societies and the curriculum, bearing in mind that these curriculum theories were developed out of contexts in the US and elsewhere, and in response to local social and political conditions. In this chapter, we consider the potential contributions of these theories to curriculum making in Singapore and what practitioners in schools need to do in order to fully benefit from these theories in the context of the local school, drawing from lessons learnt from a case study of how schoolbased curriculum development (SBCD) is carried out in a Singapore school.
