The analysis of policy documents paving the way for this reform, however, showsa sequence of unfulfilled plans and promises. The new Education Act mandated that each school had to develop its own curriculum using the new national framework. This change model was adopted at the macro level,when the Social Democrats formed a government in 1998. Schools that voluntarily joined the Healthy Schoolnetwork were expected to restructuretheir core processes by an approach similar to school-based curriculum development. In the Czech Republic, from the very first days of the Velvet Revolution (November 1989), groups of citizens and teachers demanded profound change in school education but the new conservative-liberal government preferred piecemeal steps.An alternative route to radical school reform was proposed at the meso level by an alliance of health psychologists and progressive teachers, using the know-how of the World Health Organization.

To explain the relationship between the macro and micro levels of curriculum development, Graeber's concept of interpretive labour is used. The Czech case sheds light on the processes of curriculum making inthe post-socialist context. As counsellors moved in between the Ministry of Education and Culture/Pedagogical Institute (macro-level) and schools/teachers (micro-level), it was possible to observe that multiple curriculum makings were taking place, given that subject-area counsellors sometimes opened up spaces and further possibilities of curriculum-making with teachers but, at others, those spaces were rendered impossible when teachers expected to receive teaching materials from them, thus reinstating pyramidal traditional hierarchical-administrative roles for both. We utilize data from individual, semi-structured interviews conductedwith subject-area counsellors and elementary schoolpractising teachers during the introduction and implementation of new curricula (2011-2014), to argue that this particular type of teacher subject emerged as a meaningful and dynamic meso-level. This type of teacher was constitutedas a hybrid expert-subject by embodying academic expertise and teaching/practical experience in classrooms. In this chapter, we trace the emergence of a particular type of teacher subject, the subject-area counsellor, who became a key player during different phases of the recent curriculum reform in the Republic of Cyprus (2004–2017).The understanding of teachers as subjects is theoretically informed by the Foucauldian notion of discursive power that helps understand how individuals are constituted (subjectivated) and governed (subjected) through language in power relations that permeate social institutions. Some brief account is provided of the enhanced involvement of EdTech companies producing online curricula and the ways the pandemic has accelerated this development with the concerning potential for the privatization of the curriculum. The ways the message systems (curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation) sit in a symbiotic relationship with each other and the impact of the strengthened significance of international and large-scale assessments on the enactment of the curriculum are also documented. Some consideration is also given to the content of the curriculum and the contemporary focus on both disciplinary knowledge and on what sorts of people schools should produce both it is argued are responses to globalization. The more recent rise of new nationalisms and ethnonationalism is seen to have potential impact on national curriculum.

Examples of this include the curriculum impacts actual and potential of the OECD's testing regime and aspirations in relation to curriculum and the EU's creation of a European education policy space.

Additionally, the chapter argues that curriculum making today is affected by ever-changing imbrications between local, national, regional and global relationships. The chapter demonstrates that one way to read recent developments in national curriculum in nations around the globe is as both expressions of and responses to globalization.

Diverse contexts