Studying curriculum as culture: early childhood policy documents in Greece and New Zealand.

Curriculum policy and enactment in early childhood education is a political phenomenon that plays out in particular cultural contexts. Comparative lenses to curriculum articulate locally constructed and implicit knowledge to external audiences. In doing so, global commonalities and tensions may become explicit. This paper interrogates curricular documents in Greece and New Zealand using selected questions from Joseph's (2011a) heuristic of 'curriculum as culture'. We do this through writing letters to each other that share our local knowledge and experiences and raise further questions. Although New Zealand and Greece are geographically and culturally two worlds apart, their curricular practices share certain discourses and have both been influenced by international trends. We argue that both countries' documents relate to first-order change where the policy document may not, in itself, update or change prior practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]