Negotiating the curriculum: an integrated approach supporting meaningful learning through learner and professional agency

Nationally, and internationally, there is a lack of student voice in the curriculum and a relative absence of the role of teachers as curriculum-makers. Furthermore, a dilemma that most national education systems face is the need for the curriculum to adapt reflexively to the social and economic challenges they are faced with. This work takes place within the Irish educational context which is currently going through a reform of lower secondary schooling that proposes significant changes to the curriculum to include the role of teachers and students, the nature of learning, and indeed the very purpose of education. This study seeks to explore the affordances of a Negotiated Integrated Curriculum (NIC) to realise these ambitions and to address some of the deficiencies identified in the Irish education system. NIC is a curriculum design that is concerned with enhancing the possibilities for personal and social integration through the organisation of curriculum around the concerns of students, collaboratively identified by educators and young people, without regard for subject-area boundaries. This study explores a ‘community’ approach to learning where the participation of young people in central decision making processes and meaningful work in a social setting is guided and supported by their teachers. This work consists of a small-scale, qualitative, longitudinal investigation across three schools; two primary and one post-primary1. The findings of this work identified that NIC had a significant impact on: the agentic engagement of students and what they considered meaningful in their learning; the social dynamics of the classroom; professional agency in the classroom and; realising policy ambitions in a significant, structured and systemic way. The work concludes by considering the place of the findings of this thesis in the context of the current change environment with recommendations to support the implementation of NIC nationally.