Towards a Transformative and Reflexive Curriculum

The development of a diversity-sensitive curriculum remains the biggest challenge for inclusive quality education which seeks to enhance learners’ transformative learning and agency. Highly differentiated curricula embraced diversity, build on meaningful knowledge production processes, tackle challenging global issues, support reflexive learning, and aim at developing an intercultural growth mindset. Learners, when operate in inclusive and transformative learning environments, can become versatile and reflexive creators as well as responsive citizens holding a clear commitment to social justice. Thus, acquiring ethical entrepreneurialism and global citizenship skills is an important goal for curriculum differentiation (e.g., modifying content, pedagogical processes, learning products, and learning environment). This chapter focuses on differentiated curriculum intervention in seven Greek early childhood schools. Differentiated learning and informed decision-making were highly responsive to real-life conditions leading to novel pathways of meaning-making and experiencing. Scaffolded repertoires negotiated complex topics such as refugeeness, war effects, forced human mobility, and refugee integration. Curriculum content and multimodal materials are aligned to academic learning as well as learners’ lifeworlds, learning styles, and interests. Finally, participatory visual arts approach has proven a useful aid to sustain children’s active engagement throughout this intervention. At the end, a public visual arts exhibition allowed children to become public narrators and advocates, express their emotions, and try to be responsive to enhance refugee integration.