ABSTRACT
This chapter on curriculum policy guidelines is an outgrowth of our background paper on curriculum guidelines (Connelly & Connelly, 2008), prepared at Allan Luke’s request, for a project on the design of curriculum syllabi in Queensland, Australia (Luke, Weir & Woods, 2008) initiated by the Queensland Studies Authority. In that paper we made the point that curriculum guidelines are policy documents that perform two sets of functions, one set political and one set practical. They are documents that play an important role in political, public discourse over the aims, purposes and accomplishments of education, and they specify what is to be taught in schools, in what order and in what relationship. In this chapter we repeat and expand this point. It happened that shortly after completing the Queensland paper we wrote the
section on curriculum policy for the Encyclopedia of Curriculum Studies (Connelly & Connelly, 2010). We found that there is little literature on curriculum policy per se. Literature summaries emphasize curriculum policy input (politics and context) and curriculum policy output (implementation), while curriculum policy per se remains mostly a black box. The juxtaposition of those two related writing tasks brought us face to face with additional curriculum policy questions, which we address in this chapter. In addition to the political and practical functions of guidelines, two key things to note at the outset are that: curriculum guidelines are a form of curriculum policy that need to be developed and understood in terms of other forms of curriculum policy; and curriculum guidelines are at the center of a complex, holistic, public, political, professional and practical network of educational discourse. Our perspective in the Queensland background paper was based primarily on our
experience with relevant processes in the Canadian Province of Ontario. One of us, Gerry Connelly, was former Director of the Ontario Ministry of Education’s Curriculum Policy Branch and was responsible for the development, revision and
implementation of Ontario curriculum policy. Currently she is Director of Education for the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and is administratively responsible for TDSB implementation of government curriculum policy. She is also responsible for the development, revision and implementation of TDSB curriculum policy and for ensuring board policy is congruent with Ministry of Education policy. This insider perspective shifted to a more outside-in perspective as we undertook the encyclopedia task. We bring these two perspectives together in this chapter.
