Curricular justice in an age of compliance: Practitioner dialogues on professional agency

Abstract This article explores curricular justice in an age of compliance. Drawing on a recorded dialogue among six educators working across elementary, secondary, district and university contexts in Ontario, Canada, we examine how contemporary accountability regimes shape professional agency and curriculum‐making. Organized around three guiding questions—whose knowledge counts, how accountability might be reclaimed and how curricular justice might be reimagined—the dialogue is treated as a methodological site of knowledge production. We argue that curricular justice cannot be achieved through compliance‐oriented policy alone. Instead, it depends on relational, dialogic and professionally grounded practices that current governance structures often constrain. Participants describe how inclusion frameworks may leave inequitable curricular structures untouched, while standardization, surveillance and deprofessionalization narrow educators’ capacity to respond to students and communities. We suggest that this post‐curriculum condition, in which policy discourse eclipses curriculum as lived practice, is also a site of possibility. Curricular justice becomes possible when educators reclaim professional judgement, relational accountability and collective agency.