Curriculum as a Compass of Renewal
“Ko te pae tawhiti whāia kia tata, ko te pae tata whakamaua kia tina.”
“Pursue the distant horizons, and cherish those you attain.”
Māori Proverb
This Māori proverb speaks to the rhythm of learning as both forward-reaching and grounded – a pursuit of what lies ahead, anchored by what has already been gathered. Learning is both an act of encounter and a relational journey – meeting new ideas and returning to them with deeper understanding, shaped by connections to people, place, and purpose, with knowledge lived, shared, and continually reinterpreted in dialogue with others.
This cyclical rhythm of reaching out and returning echoes Wegerif’s (2025) description of education as turning the outside in and then back out again, with new encounters renewing both the person and the shared space of meaning.
“Education has always been a circling between the collective outside – our inherited cultures, languages, and discourses – and the formation of individual insides: people capable of renewing culture by speaking from within it.”
Professor Rupert Wegerif
Curriculum too narrates such a process of encounter, transformation, and return. On this journey, disciplinary ways of thinking open up new ways of knowing, moving learning beyond surface opinion towards encountering ideas that are new, sometimes counterintuitive and difficult, but often desirably so (Bjork & Bjork, 2011).
Take mathematics. Some young children struggle with calculation – not from lack of effort, but because teaching has not yet helped them make the connections that unlock mathematical insight. In early additive reasoning, for example, children draw on secure number bond knowledge to bridge confidently over ten: regrouping 7 + 8 as 7 + 3 + 5 or as 8 + 2 + 5, or seeing the 5 + 5 + 5 within. Without this, they rely on counting strategies and miss the unitising structure of ten. Here, fluency enables them to revisit and reinterpret ideas with increasing depth – applying them flexibly, connecting them meaningfully, and integrating them into their thinking and action.
The same is true beyond mathematics. While not all subjects build in such a conceptually hierarchical way, progression in any domain depends on the cumulative development of knowledge, concepts, and disciplinary understanding.
Deep learning unfolds through layered encounters – where technical understanding and human meaning gradually come into view together (Bransford, Brown & Cocking, 2000). When a student first comes across the River Ganges – perhaps through a photograph – they may simply see it as a wide, crowded river: busy, unfamiliar, distant. But with growing conceptual understanding of its religious context and philosophical meaning – of ideas like samsara, moksha, puja, and pilgrimage – they begin to recognise it not merely as a place, but as a sacred presence in Hindu life: a source of purification, a site of worship, a bridge between the earthly and the divine. The image has not changed, but their relationship to it has been transformed. Curriculum helps students perceive differently: interpret, connect with, and find meaning through themselves and the world around them.
Mapping the Terrain: Knowledge, Depth, and Direction
Curriculum design seems to often find itself caught between two pitfalls: the overcrowded “mile wide, inch deep” model and an over-pruned one that strips away vital content in the pursuit of depth. Surma et al. (2024) argue that depth of thinking develops through the dynamic interplay of activating prior knowledge, sequencing content with deliberate progression, and integrating spaced retrieval to strengthen and connect learning over time. Varying the contexts in which students encounter concepts, through the deliberate use of variation (Gu et al., 2004) can help students to distinguish essential features, refine understanding, and recognise underlying structures. Such conceptual transfer – whether between curriculum units, across subjects, or into unfamiliar contexts, marks a deeper and more flexible understanding. In short, deep understanding depends on a rich foundational breadth of knowledge and cutting content too early in the name of depth often removes the very material students need to make meaningful connections.
A well-designed curriculum needs to identify and carefully sequence its core concepts, ensuring they are revisited in ways that deepen understanding and allow students to apply them in new contexts (Oates & Reiss, 2015). As Christine Counsell points to, in its scope of ambition, “the curriculum itself is the progression model. Its mastery is progress” (Counsell, 2018). And within the different forms of knowing, there will be no shortage of depth to explore:
- Substantive knowledge – The factual and explanatory knowledge students learn e.g. The Ancient Egyptians built pyramids as tombs for pharaohs, rooted in beliefs about gods and the afterlife.
- Disciplinary knowledge – How knowledge is established, tested, and applied within a subject e.g. Understanding scientific fair testing through investigating how light affects plant growth, changing only light levels while keeping water, soil, and temperature constant.
- Substantive concepts – Subject-specific ideas that recur and build understanding over time, e.g. Adaptation refers to how organisms evolve features that help them survive in specific environments.
- Disciplinary oracy – Speaking and listening with clarity and precision using the structures, language, and reasoning of the subject, e.g. In history, presenting an argument supported by evidence from multiple sources.
Dialogue is not only an outcome of curriculum attainment but a primary means of engaging with it. Structured, sustained interthinking enables learners to reason together, consider multiple perspectives, and build shared understanding. Open to what Wegerif (2025) calls the ‘infinite other’, dialogue resists cognitive closure, staying alive to surprise, challenge, and new questions.
Curriculum as Journey and Compass
The wisdom of the Māori proverb recognises learning as cyclical – reaching toward the distant horizon while holding fast to what has been gathered. Curriculum can be understood in the same way: a repertoire in motion, continually reorganised, refined, and reapplied through cycles of encounter, transformation, and return. Over time, these cycles widen into new domains and deepen in insight, fostering connections that are both expansive and generative. A meeting place between disciplinary rigour and lived experience, where knowledge serves to deepen perspective.
Because curriculum is shaped by human choices, it inevitably carries assumptions; left unexamined, these can quietly reinforce what goes unquestioned. Yet curriculum can also serve as a compass – not prescribing thought, but orienting learners toward questions that matter to themselves, to others, and to the world. While maps give form, it is the journeying that brings them to life – shaped by encounters, returns that reshape understanding, and reinterpretations that speak to both present and future. Curriculum ultimately lives not on the page but in how learners navigate it, revisit it anew, and carry it forward with purpose and responsibility.
With sincere thanks to Professor Rupert Wegerif for his generous feedback on an earlier draft.
References
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In Psychology and the real world (pp. 56–64). Worth.
Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school (Expanded ed.). National Academies Press.
Counsell, C. (2018). Taking curriculum seriously. Impact: Journal of the Chartered College of Teaching, (4), 6–9.
Gu, L., Huang, R., & Marton, F. (2004). Teaching with variation: A Chinese way of promoting effective mathematics learning. In L. Fan, N.-Y. Wong, J. Cai, & S. Li (Eds.), How Chinese learn mathematics: Perspectives from insiders (pp. 309–347). World Scientific.
OECD. (2018). The Future of Education and Skills 2030 (Position paper). OECD.
Reiss, M., & Oates, T. (2015). The importance of powerful knowledge in the national curriculum [Video]. Cambridge Assessment.
Surma, T., Vanhees, C., Wils, M., Nijlunsing, J., Crato, N., Hattie, J., Muijs, D., Rata, E., Wiliam, D., & Kirschner, P. A. (2025). Developing curriculum for deep thinking: The knowledge revival (SpringerBriefs in Education). Springer. (Open access).
UNESCO. (2015). Rethinking education: Towards a global common good? UNESCO.
UNESCO. (2021). Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education. UNESCO.
Wegerif, R. (2025). Rethinking educational theory: Education as expanding dialogue. Edward Elgar.
