The Teacher's Role in Curriculum Development: an unresolved issue in English attempts at curriculum reform

ABSTRACT The paper compares the British curriculum reforms of the 1960s with contemporary government‐initiated reforms, and argues that the central problem of pedagogical change persists because the latter adopted one of the two solutions to the problem which emerged from the former; namely, the objectives model of socially engineering change. The other solution, proposed by Lawrence Stenhouse, which views curriculum change as a social experiment in which teachers play a central role, has been neglected. The paper attempts to demonstrate the validity of Stenhouse's contention that there can be no curriculum development without the professional development of teachers as researchers of their own practices In schools and classrooms.