Learner engagement in the construction of a relevant curriculum: the project RRC

International Conference: A Child's World - Next Steps, 25 June 2012 - 27th June 2014.

The project "Researching for a relevant curriculum" (RRC) started in 2007, when some elementary school teachers from the Azores, Portugal, who were worried about some pupils lack of interest for the curriculum, decided to address that problem, in collaboration witch university professors, through action research. Other possibilities notwithstand1ng, the team explored the hypothesis that some pupils were not interested in the curriculum because they did not acknowledge its relevance for their extra-school lives, considering that content is not frequently presented "as a means of understanding the world around us, but as a series of separate pieces of information (...) that [the pupils] are subsequently incapable of using" (Esteve, 2000, p. 12). […].