Teacher agency and curriculum making: Supporting inquiry-based learning in geographical and sustainability education

In Singapore, close attention is paid to the idea of geography teachers as curriculum makers in pre-service and professional development programmes. Curriculum making aims at balancing subject matter knowledge and goals against student experiences and needs, complementing the Singapore Teaching Practice in useful ways. This chapter outlines how curriculum making supports teacher agency and professionalism in creating lesson inquiry sequences with transformative potential for their students. In addition, curriculum making also helps teachers to reconcile tensions within geography education as a subject that is intrinsically valuable against its role in achieving other educational outcomes, such as developing values related to sustainable development and other 21st-century competences. Through the use of worked examples, curriculum making’s foundation in conceptual thinking and its role in inquiry-based learning and in the development of powerful knowledge are also illustrated.