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The internal workings of working class writing and publishing groups reveals important insights about the nature of democracy. The attempt to form collective and co-operative groups that supported everyone led to an active re-making of educational relationships along democratic lines. The insistence upon equality between writers, irrespective of individual ability, was a cardinal principle. However, in a changing funding climate, workshops came under pressure to formalise relationships, professionalise and introduce management structures. This had mixed results as groups attempted to negotiate these tensions. The example of the Fed brings into question some key aspects of critical pedagogy which privileges the role of tutors and education as a whole and, in some cases, assumes that learners have internalised dominant ideas.

In this chapter, Todd Butler and Ashley Boyd give new reasons for attending to pedagogical training in literary studies classrooms. With so many English majors planning to enter secondary classrooms of their own, Butler and Boyd highlight the potential impact that combining social justice and content knowledge pedagogies can have on generations of classroom learners. At the same time, they claim that including teaching methodologies in undergraduate literature courses builds pedagogy as a habit of mind for all undergraduates, encouraging them to consider issues of social justice in their readings, and how those issues might be effectively conveyed to others.

With the fundamental curriculum concepts and methods introduced in the preceding chapters, it is hoped that readers can manage to devise alternative ways to design the most appropriate curriculum for the new generations in the twenty-first century. However, unless our community moves ahead with authentic reforms in education, the aims of the reforms will remain rhetorical or superficially implemented in classrooms. Hence, we stress in this chapter that curriculum change is pertinent to educational change. This stance is indeed supported by a famous academic of educational change, Michael Fullan. This chapter begins with an analysis of the perceptible threats we now face in our curriculum, followed by a brief account of ideas raised by some academics/researchers on how to reform the school curriculum. Curriculum trend, in relation to critical pedagogy and moral/value education, is also addressed. It is anticipated that readers will gain useful insights which are conducive to helping them shape their professional stance and vision in an era of change. Finally, it proposes some basic questions and principles for readers to consider when they deliberate on a future curriculum.