The purpose of this article is to explore and discuss the issues and tasks the recently issued general guideline draft for the 2015 National Curriculum assigns to subject matter curriculum development. To achieve this purpose, the article reviews the ...
The purpose of this article is to explore and discuss the issues and tasks the recently issued general guideline draft for the 2015 National Curriculum assigns to subject matter curriculum development. To achieve this purpose, the article reviews the major features of the general guideline draft for the 2015 National Curriculum, as well as issues the features attributed to curriculum development for subject matters and explores the nature of the subject matter content that should be included in the subject matter curriculum. According to the result of this study, the general guideline draft for the 2015 National Curriculum rhetorically emphasizes student learning, suggests strong pedagogical implications, and sensitively responds to demands from the nation and society. However, too much interest in these features could lead to overlooking the discussion of the core knowledge of subject matters in subject matter curriculum development, which reveals this issue should be reviewed in depth. Therefore, this article ends with an exploration of the ‘powerful knowledge’ of subject matter as one of the tasks for subject matter curriculum development, as well as how powerful knowledge could be when realized through subject matter curriculum.