The Child and Curriculum. Existential Questions and Educational Responses

Project description

Contemporary, there is a strong focus on achievements and outcomes of education which make the risk of neglecting the learners and their interest obvious. Therefore a project aiming at understanding the relation between children's questions and educational responses is crucial.

In this project qualitative studies of the relationship between child and curriculum are undertaken in three parts:

1. a newly generated data-material is compared to archival data-material with a focus on 11 to 12-year-old children's expressions of their existential questions.;
2. educational responses to children's existential questions are studied through curricula, didactical approaches, and teacher interviews on their practices;
3. the results from these two parts are brought into a critical 'dialogue' where the results are used for curriculum and didactical development.

This four-year-study is based at Umeå University (UmU), where archival material of children's existential questions from 1970s to early 2000s is stored. It is carried out by two UmU researchers and two additional researchers, one from Gothenburg University and one from Aalborg University, Denmark.