Teachers’ curriculum work can be a controversial topic (see for example Priestley, 2011). It is a high-level concern for politicians, public commentators, parents and professional groups, and for those who determine, design and develop curriculum for nations, systems and schools. It is a daily reality for countless teachers and students. The great theoretical and practical complexity of the topic of curriculum can be effectively tamed by adopting an image of teachers’ curriculum work as essentially that of transmission. Transmission here makes intuitive sense in a society fundamentally structured by division of labour; it seems natural that curriculum would be debated by one group, elaborated by another, and applied by a third.
Education researchers have long objected to the transmission image and its implications (see for example Clandinin & Connelly, 1992), but the image itself has exhibited remarkable resilience. Theory of interpretation (or ‘hermeneutics’ – the formal study of reading and understanding texts and artefacts) offers another form of critique of the transmission image. Although unlikely to influence whatever societal patterns of thought underpin faith in it, hermeneutic theory at least helps us understand why it is that centralised curriculum intentions and reforms are very often frustrated in practice.
The prompt for tapping into hermeneutic theory is the observation that when teachers work with curriculum, they read, interpret and apply, thus selectively translating what is received into the plans, activities and resources of the classroom. Hermeneutics is quite an old area of study that first emerged in response to the challenge of finding the ‘true’ meaning of scriptures in contexts far removed from original sites of production. Interpreting laws also created questions that shaped hermeneutics. In these settings, contestation over the meaning of important texts produced theories of interpretation. Over time, these theories were found to be relevant to broader research topics, and in the 20th century, hermeneutics became a full-blown philosophical field concerned with human existence and social meaning-making.
