'"Making" and "taking" problems: The curriculum field and Michael Young'

Abstract

Curriculum has for a long time been a lively area of inquiry and debate in Australia, but the first establishment of a designated Chair of Curriculum was a more recent development, the one to which I was appointed Foundation Professor at the University of Melbourne in 2005. I spent a lot of the first year of that appointment thinking and talking about the scope and agendas of this field as a field. What is an academic who is located as a curriculum scholar expected to be doing? Is the role of the curriculum scholar to be a critic or academic commentator, or is it to be a critical friend or an authority on what to do? Is it to examine practice and problems of practice or to think big theories..