Curriculum as critical, creative choreography

The value of an editorial lies in its capacity to serve as something of a pulse check. That is, in deliberately narrative terms, it provides a key performance indicator of the epistemic and ethical health of a field. In this edition of the BERA Curriculum Journal, we have 19 original articles and one review article. We may reasonably conclude that there is a healthy buoyancy to the field of curriculum studies. But that is not the only conclusion that a review of these papers allows. We—the current editorial team—have our own markers of health, which connect explicitly to the nature of the papers presented. And here, the indicators are more complex. Our curriculum dreaming has not changed. We remain animated by an impassioned commitment to enhancing the ethical imagination through decolonisation, anti-racist pedagogies and the embodiment of equity, diversity and inclusion. But the enactment of this vision is premised on dialogue across multiple lines. One line of inequity we seek to disrupt through dialogue is geolocation. There are 195 countries in the world, and so not every country's curriculum is examined in these pages. We do, however, have a clear geolocation. Writers based in the UK are well represented in several papers, as are those in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Turkey; Norway, Nigeria, Portugal and South Korea. Where writers come from matters, but so too does the focus of their scholarship. Auld et al.'s (2025, CJ 37: 2) paper on truth telling in the Australian Curriculum opens this edition. It connects directly to our avowed curricular concerns and sets the tone for several of the papers that follow. I would like to claim this coherence as strategic rather than serendipitous. Auld et al. are concerned with the extent to which truth-telling terms—atrocities, discrimination, dispossession, frontier, genocide, invasion, malnutrition, massacres, murder, trauma and truth—are appropriately included in history curriculum documents. Two themes strike me most in reading this paper—themes that are nicely threaded through other contributions. If this is a pulse check on the state of curriculum studies, Auld et al.'s paper may indicate something significant about how people come to know or make knowledge about curriculum. A theme integral to reading their work is the explicit reference to the history of colonialism and genocide in Australia, and its contemporary resonance. But their methodology also invites careful consideration of what counts as curriculum knowledge and how curriculum knowledge is made. Their work is a welcome example of collaborative research, with a team of seasoned academics working alongside students to produce knowledge about curriculum. They invite us to consider carefully the methodologies deployed throughout this edition. While hypothesis testing, surveys and statistical methods remain established modes of enquiry, other more creative and critical methods are also in evidence. Interviews, mixed methods, case studies, interpretive phenomenological analysis, participant observation and focus groups are all well represented. This is welcome not only because it hints at departure or disruption, but because these methodologies position curriculum as a space of dialogue and collaboration. Three distinct voices are discernible in this space of curriculum as dialogue: student voice, civic responsibility and teacher agency. It is arguably civic responsibility that leads to the long-lasting and ongoing global anxiety around educational standards. Educational standards are deemed crucial for economic success and are always, already and only ever falling. This anxiety is articulated in terms of crisis—a narrative fuelled, but not assuaged, by competition and regimes of accountability. In the clamour for global pre-eminence, the voice of the teacher is frequently subsumed. Attention swings pendulum-like between policy prescription and professional autonomy (Wood balancing academic rigour with practical applicability (Cheung et al., 2025, this volume); the urgency of planetary challenges set against the routines of everyday schooling (Kim, 2025, this volume)—these are helpful ways into a curricular conversation. The either/or scenario points towards the creative, constructive tension integral to curriculum work. However, the binary dissolves with alarming speed. It is hardly possible to maintain a narrative involving assessment, pedagogy and policy alongside student voice and professional judgement—as well as lingering aspirations for the public good—in straightforward binary terms. Student voice is another aspect of curriculum as dialogue. Garrard and Cairns (2025, this volume) use social media to recruit a large, diverse sample of senior secondary students to speak about their history curriculum. Their 4Ds framework—device, decision-makers, data and distance—brings to the fore both the ethical risks and democratic promise of digital listening at scale. Avoiding the pessimism that frequently surrounds online spaces, these are not fearfully closed down as distractions but reframed as civic infrastructures for curriculum inquiry, enabling perspectives that conventional consultation often misses. In hearing the direct, unmediated curricular voice of students and teachers, we are reminded that it is not documents alone that make curriculum. Viewed through dialogue and collaboration, curriculum is made through active negotiation—voices embedded in documents and vivified by students and teachers. Structural tensions are woven into curricular documents, as an orientation towards skill is counterbalanced by an orientation towards disciplinary content knowledge. This plays out within the gravitational force field of high-stakes examinations, which inevitably influence curricular selection and pedagogic choices (Grønset et al., 2025, this volume). Curriculum becomes a ritualised dance where epistemic boundaries are (re)negotiated in real time. This idea does not preclude policy prescription. It is to acknowledge that in curriculum making, policy operates within clearly defined and restricted temporal boundaries—the next election is always in view. Teaching is a lifelong career commitment. Studentship—whether early years or postgraduate—enfolds generational aspirations and unscripted possibilities. The craft of curriculum making cannot be reduced to compliance. Curriculum as compliance is a hollowed-out undertaking (Wong, 2025, this volume). But as the richly textured papers serendipitously curated here make clear, compliance cannot capture the choreography implied by the interplay between structure and autonomy, or indeed any other shorthand duality. In making curriculum, teachers deftly move between curriculum types, surfacing formal ideas at teachable moments and at other times loosening to sustain exploration in open spaces (Mart & Campbell-Barr, 2025, this volume). Curriculum here lies not in choosing play or structure but in knowing how, and when, to weave between them. As we continue in our commitment to enhancing the ethical imagination, the writers in this volume of the BERA Curriculum Journal help us to imagine curriculum as creative critical choreography. No funding was provided for this work. There is no conflict of interest. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.