Radical imagination and reimagining the space of curriculum for democracy

Abstract School-level education in Australia, and in other parts of the world, is currently directed by forces of conformity and compliance. These forces are typically characterised by doctrines of standards and standardisation, and metrics of accountability and performance. Yet, education in Australia is simultaneously underwritten by values of democracy, equity and justice. The tension between conformity and compliance, and education for democracy produces an ethical and practical struggle for teachers. Recent research tells us that education driven by conformity and compliance de-democratises the experience of schooling for both teachers and young people, while also undermining efforts to cultivate democracy across generations. Drawing on Lefebvre, this paper offers a spatial account of curriculum that opens new spaces of possibility and imagination for doing curriculum work beyond compliance. Curriculum in this paper is theorised across a triad of conceived, perceived, and lived space. This theorisation offers a way to describe how the administrative and regulatory spaces of official curriculum and policy cut across and entangle with the everyday and lived curriculum spaces of teachers and young people. The situated intersections of these spaces shape the way curriculum is enacted and experienced in local settings. I bring bell hooks’ pedagogy of imagination into conversation with this theorisation to propose how the perceived and lived spaces of curriculum might be reimagined as radical spaces of possibility that enable an education that is at its heart democratic, and that works for democracy and social justice.