Future curriculum‐makers: The role of professional experience placements as sites of learning about curriculum‐making for preservice teachers

The teaching profession and initial teacher education face ongoing pressures which challenge how teachers' work with curriculum is positioned. Within Australia, recent reviews into initial teacher education have emphasised the need for ‘classroom ready’ graduates with knowledge of ‘proven’ pedagogical approaches. Parallel to this has been increasing push for ‘ready‐made’ curriculum materials to be made available to all teachers for their use in classrooms. This discourse espouses curriculum as a product, positioning preservice teachers as future ‘deliverers’ of prescriptive forms of curriculum and dismissing their future potential as classroom curriculum‐makers who engage with curriculum as a process, and think systematically and critically about their curriculum choices. In this paper, we explore the classroom curriculum‐making experiences of two preservice teachers, and the role of professional experience placements as key sites of learning about curriculum‐making, noting this as a significantly under‐researched theme in existing literature. Our in‐depth exploration of these individual cases highlights the contrasting opportunities these teachers had to engage with curriculum as a process, identifying, enabling and constraining structures within these placements which impact on preservice teachers' development, and future potential, as curriculum‐makers. We contend that the pursuit of Lawrence Stenhouse's vision of curriculum work as an iterative, enquiry process driven by and for teachers rests not only on the way in which initial teacher education frames curriculum work in theory, but also in the way it is modelled to preservice teachers during their professional experience placements.