‘Curriculum Studies’ in Cyprus: a research agenda for curriculum, bildung and didaktik as challenges of translation and re-contextualisation

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which ‘curriculum’ has been used and translated in curricular documents in the Greek language, published and used in Greece and/or Cyprus. Already notorious as a complex and multifaceted concept, ‘curriculum’ has been ascribed multiple meanings and nuances, a complexity amplified when we explore its use in diverse languages and contexts. By focusing on how such meanings have been used in Cyprus as a case-study, evidently largely drawing upon both the Anglo-american (curriculum and instruction/teaching) and the continental European (bildung-influenced didaktik) traditions, the directions Curriculum Studies as a field has been taking can be discussed. This discussion is suggested as a tool to identify issues around the ‘transfer’, ‘translation’ and ‘transformation’ and ‘re-contextualization’ of ‘curriculum’ as a concept and term as well as ‘curriculum studies’ as an academic field in contexts other than those in which they emerged, against the background of curriculum research which explores genealogies of the curriculum field internationally (e.g. Pinar, 2013a) or compares Anglo-American and continental European Curriculum Studies (e.g. Autio, 2006; Gundem, 2010; Gundem & Hopmann, 2002; Hudson, 2007; Westbury, Hopmann & Riquarts, 2000). By beginning to explore how curriculum, bildung and didaktik have been historically construed in policy writing in a language other than English through the case of the Greek language in general and the shape of the field in Cyprus in particular, this study cautiously responds to calls for the internationalization of the field of Curriculum Studies, sheds light in the multiple and complex ways in which ‘curriculum’ and the attendant field translates and transforms within a particular sociocultural context, and contributes to understanding ‘Cyprus’ as a case amidst the international map of Curriculum Studies by discussing its unique characteristics and challenges.