 To be an artist, to be a worker and to be a doctor. I teach English and I love my subjects. I teach because the most fun you can ever have is in class. I like to learn computers. Schools are places we've always been time in so they usually strike us as commonplace but they are very particular environments. Things happen in them that wouldn't happen anywhere else and that we instantly recognize as happening in school no matter what kind of school it may be. The main reason most schools exist is to see to it that young people learn systematically. A simple idea but one that raises many questions. What are they to learn? How are they to learn it? How are such decisions to be arrived at in the first place? And will the choices that are made really benefit all learners or will they advantage some and disadvantage others? Can we be sure that they are really learning what the curriculum planners or teachers intend them to learn? If we put learners into the sorts of environments that schools and classrooms are will they not learn other things simply by being there? These are some of the important questions that this audio tape sets out to explore. They all relate to the curriculum. The advent of curriculum 2005 and later, curriculum 21, put the word curriculum on everyone's lips making it a household word. But it seems to me that these days the word curriculum is used in many different ways. Let's begin with a common sense meaning of the term, same for teachers who work with curricula every day. We talk to Brenda Lieberwitz of the National Department of Education Centre for Curriculum Development. When I imagine what people think when they use the word curriculum is a document, it's a piece of paper and on it would be stipulated various things. And the emphasis would have been on content and what should be covered at what level, what subject and it could go on to issues of assessment, how many marks allocated to which issue. I think that's quite a big part of a curriculum as I remember it when I was a teacher. So it would be a documented piece of paper stipulating what you taught as a teacher with very little emphasis to the how. So most people would understand the curriculum to be similar to the concept of the syllabus, a blueprint for what is to be taught. But you seem to imply that you no longer see the curriculum in such terms. Why did you change your view? I think that one of the departures from the notion of the curriculum as what's on paper was with the notion of the hidden curriculum which simply means when we teach. It's not just what we teach but it's how we teach and that itself gives messages to the learner. So we're talking about a whole broad range of activities there. For example, when I was at school this was really bizarre but the boys did something called cadets. They wore army uniforms in their blue bugle for about an hour and a half every Friday. Now that wasn't stipulated in the maths curriculum or the science curriculum but it was part of what the boys were being taught and the girls watched this bizarre occasion. What do you think the learners were actually learning from that experience? In terms of gender issues I felt sorry for the boys who had to do this ridiculous thing but the fact of the matter was that they were going to be the upholders of the nation and the secures of the nation whereas the girls were, it was not relevant for them. So you're entrenching your gender relations via the hidden curriculum. Can I give you examples from the writer Alan Luke who would observe storytelling so that we're not just talking about extracurricular activities. You would be getting the children to link sentences and words together getting the children to make sentences like a pretty princess but a scary lion. So from a very early age we're getting children to link concepts together. The princess is female, she's pretty. It's not important that she be scary or powerful and so from a very early age then you're getting associations to form in the minds of children. So that's the notion of a hidden curriculum in terms of the extramural activities but also in terms of the way we use language in the classroom and that's a very powerful aspect of socialization. So powerful that we're not aware of it and how it's taking us along its influencing path at all the time. So you say the curriculum if it represents what the learners actually experience is a far broader concept than simply the official plan the blueprint of what is to be taught. I'm in an institute which is trying to theorize curriculum and curriculum change and what we mean if we want to change the curriculum. We look at a variety of issues we look at the curriculum as document you look at the hidden curriculum and how teachers and in my interest particularly how they use language but we've included a much broader set of references around what is the curriculum. It's also what the principal's doing it's also what the district level facilitators also known as learning area facilitators or subject advisory services and so on they're all part of the broad curriculum. If we talk about another absolutely crucial aspect of the curriculum as it's played out in South Africa today it's assessment and exams. Researchers went to classrooms to look at how language is being used to foster student learning and they found a number of really important issues and worrying issues the one of them was a constant harping on the exams. They would go into standard 9, 10 classrooms grades, now grades, 10, 11 and 12 and find a lot of teachers constantly reminding students that they'll need this and that for the exams don't bother with us it doesn't come up in the exams but equally they'd be harping on ways of learning and structuring learning that they know would be valued in an exam paper. So the curriculum involves texts it involves exams, it involves the mediation that's coming through from the society and the extramural activities and maybe we could include the aspects of the society as well for example if you take religious bodies in a society and how they might influence what teachers at that school are going to say a teacher in a strongly Muslim school is not going to say something in the classroom that they know will get repeated to the parents who might be offended by that a similar thing could be happening with Christian teachers in schools I remember teaching an evolution in a standard 6 classroom and being quite nervous that the students would go home and repeat this to parents who might disapprove. So it seems that what learners learn could be shaped by factors as far removed from the actual content of lessons as a teacher's concern about exams and exam results or the religions of pupils and their parents.