ABSTRACT
Although there are a numerous ways to engage in curriculum inquiry, we have found that considering curriculum as culture is a way to attain a holistic understanding of education, not only as planned curricular content, but as experienced or lived “in the presence of people and their meanings” (Aoki, 1991, p. 14). We also have learned that this line of inquiry helps educators to go beyond awareness of explicit curriculum as a set of guidelines or objectives (Westbury, 2000), to ‘”make the commonplace problematic” (Pink 1990, p. 139) by challenging the idea of curriculum as a singular reality. Instead we consider curriculum as deeply infl uenced by culture and thus to do curriculum inquiry is “to become aware of belief systems that infl uence what is considered normal, or alternative, or simply unthinkable” (Joseph, 2007, p. 286).
