Curriculum That Fits: Why Context Is Not a Variable to Control
Most curriculum design treats context as noise. What if context is the signal?
There is a recurring assumption in curriculum design that good curriculum is portable — that if it works in one setting, it can be adapted (with minor tweaks) for another. This assumption is worth examining.
In my experience designing curriculum across nonprofit and ed-tech contexts in India, the “minor tweaks” are rarely minor. The vocabulary a teacher uses, the examples that resonate, the kinds of knowledge students bring to a lesson, the social dynamics of asking questions out loud — all of these vary enormously across communities, and all of them shape whether a curriculum actually teaches what it claims to teach.
The problem with “culturally relevant” as add-on
One common response to this is to make curriculum “culturally relevant” — add diverse names to word problems, include local examples in readings, represent different backgrounds in illustrations. This is better than nothing. But it treats culture as decoration layered onto a curriculum that was built somewhere else, for someone else.
What I am interested in is curriculum that starts from a different place: from the specific questions, resources, and forms of knowledge that students in a given community already have. Not as a warm-up before the “real” content, but as the foundation.
What this looks like in practice
In STEM contexts, this might mean starting a unit on systems thinking with the water infrastructure students interact with daily, rather than an abstract model. In literacy, it might mean treating students’ home languages as analytical tools rather than deficits to remediate.
The shift is not just pedagogical — it is epistemological. It asks: whose knowledge counts as the starting point?
That question has guided my work, and it is the one I keep returning to in my research.