Australian academic Raewyn Connell explains the process of building higher education curriculum as one of imposing order and structure on chaos.
Extending knowledge through research is an inherently messy process – proceeding in fits and starts, evolving in unpredictable ways, without fixed conclusions. Building curriculum, by contrast, is a process of selecting what academics consider to be important for students to know and arranging it in some kind of sequence or narrative according to the logic of the discipline.
All academics probably have a very excusable bias in considering their own specialist topic to be absolutely essential to what it means to graduate in a subject – but within subject communities the debate about what belongs in curricula is appropriately lively. Especially in recent years, with inclusion and decolonisation agendas, the knowledge content of higher education curricula have come under greater scrutiny.
