Curriculum aims and principles specify pedagogical criteria for representing curriculum
content – the objects of learning – to students in an educationally worthwhile
manner. To become clearer about them through action research is to become
clearer about the ideal pedagogical relationship between the content of the curriculum,
teachers and learners. This explains why teachers’ action research has tended
to emerge in curriculum change contexts that require content to be represented as
dynamic objects of the student’s understanding – of his/her thinking and discernment
– rather than simply as inert ‘knowledge’ to be learned, remembered and
applied. Lo (2012, 41–43) has recently echoed Lawrence Stenhouse when she
argues that an object of learning ‘is different from a learning objective’. By stating
the learning objectives, teachers are ‘treating the end result of learning as if it can be
predetermined’, she claims. By way of contrast, an object of learning is a dynamic
concept. Lo writes: