Teacher autonomy and curriculum planning in community classrooms. A conversation with Stenhouse

Stenhouse’s work on curriculum and teacher research covers depths that transcend time and space. This study aims to review his approaches to teacher autonomy and curriculum planning within the framework of Chilean community classroom experiences. These are teaching initiatives that seek to transform their curricular work from within their classrooms by bringing together a very heterogeneous group of people with whom they share their decisions on what is taught, the way it is taught and for what purpose. A participatory action research team that formed 10 research communities in 10 classrooms distributed throughout the country, went from a limited individual autonomy, like the one analysed by Stenhouse, towards shared autonomies that differ from the autonomy approach of the professional community by this author. In direct coherence with this, these teachers abandon the curricular planning imposed by the official curriculum and create curricular projects together with the collectives that make up the community classroom, thus fulfilling the need for the democratization of intellectual and cultural resources, as demanded by this visionary pedagogue.