The New Zealand Draft Curriculum 2006: A Policy Case Study with Specific Reference to its Understanding of Teaching as an Ethical Profession

Abstract

The New Zealand Draft Curriculum was released in mid-2006 and intended for final implementation in September 2007. This draft policy document serves as a useful model for analysis employing a method of policy analysis proposed by Bell & Stevenson. Additionally, this article specifically asks to what extent the Draft Curriculum advances a concept of teaching as an ethical profession. Conceptions of the kind of profession teaching has become in New Zealand in the twenty-first century will be considered, and this article will attempt an account of what it might be to conceptualise teaching as an ‘ethical profession’. Against this conceptual backdrop, the New Zealand Draft Curriculum will be asked to provide its account of the teaching profession.