In the emerging global culture of education as multicultural, multilingual, and plurilingual, curriculum design for language courses has become a contested and complex space to ensure cultural and linguistic responsivity. However, dominated neoliberal ideology often promotes a static and monologic view of curriculum in which teacher’s role is reduced to passive recipients of a pre-packaged curriculum rather than active agents of change and contribution. This ‘ordinary’ practice and positioning have been occasionally elevated by some ‘innovative’ approaches in the design such as inclusion of digital technologies, AI or multimodality. Despite some benefits at the methodological level of ‘what’ constitutes a curriculum, the ontological and epistemological grounds, informing ‘how’ and ‘why’ remain unexamined.

In a longitudinal study (2020-2023), conducted in a language curriculum design course at the tertiary level of an Australian University, alternative possibilities were explored through a theoretical and pedagogical intervention. Informed by Bakhtin’s dialogic approach to self, language and culture along with Van Lier’s perspective to curriculum as interaction and his AAA principles, namely (Awareness, Autonomy, Authenticity), this intervention reconceptualised curriculum as a dynamic, fluid, open-ended and socio-culturally embedded platform, through which teachers can exercise their process of becoming competent and confident curriculum designers across sectors, locally and globally. Participant teachers got engaged in dialogic discussion on diverse ideological grounds of curriculum, such as adopted literacy approaches, notion of students’ needs and rights, selection of texts and resources and assessment.

This presentation highlights participants’ potential transformations through their reflections and actual designs which signify their increased awareness on what drives their practice, their attempt for authentic practices, and their autonomous pedagogical action. This dialogic praxis underscores the rich potentials of curriculum design spaces in bringing to the fore heterogonous voices of teachers and students to argue, create, reflect, narrate and collaborate more fruitfully.