Teachers and students as researchers: rebuilding curriculum inquiry for the future

Inquiry, investigation, research: in our busy lives, we tend to undertake these activities only when there is a burning question, an ‘ouch’ experience, or occasionally when we need to plan something new. We don’t want to waste time on anything that seems not important. So curriculum inquiries do not tend to focus on ‘What’s in the official curriculum syllabus?’ nor ‘What’s on my timetable for next year?’. Rather, curriculum inquiry is mainly undertaken when there is no neat answer to a question worth spending time on—because addressing it, even if only finding partial ‘answers’, is valuable to our work.