FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
A collection of answers to some of the questions we’re most frequently asked about our work and the Curriculum of Giving.
Why is the Curriculum of Giving not a curriculum?
The word curriculum can mean different things, and this distinction is important to us.
In Australia, the Australian Curriculum is the national framework that sets out what students should learn. It includes curriculum content and achievement standards across learning areas and subjects, and is developed nationally by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA).
But the Australian Curriculum is not the same thing as the curriculum that a student ultimately experiences at school. State and territory authorities, education systems, and schools determine how it is implemented within their contexts. What is formally specified can, therefore, look quite different when it is interpreted, planned, taught, and experienced.
Yet, somewhere along this journey, curriculum can become experienced as administrative work: planning, documenting, assessing, reporting, and demonstrating that requirements have been met. These processes serve important purposes, but when they become too dominant, they can leave less time and space for the relational, responsive, and creative work of teaching.
Curriculum can then become reduced to a list of things to cover or activities to complete — a kind of “tell me what to do” approach to teaching.
Teaching, however, is not simply the delivery of predetermined content. What if the most powerful curriculum we teach is not simply what we do, but who we are? What if what matters is not only how we intellectually understand a subject, but how we see, relate to, and are with others – and with ourselves?
This is where the idea of the Curriculum of Giving begins: exploring whether giving can become central to how we understand and experience education — not as another piece of content, but as a way of seeing, being, and acting, informed by research and evidence about wellbeing and human flourishing.
The name is deliberately provocative. What if curriculum is not only what we formally specify for students to learn, but also the qualities, relationships, and ways of being they encounter every day? What, after all, are we teaching through who we are — whether or not we have written it down?
How do I use the Curriculum of Giving?
There is no prescribed way to use the Curriculum of Giving — and that is intentional.
Our work provides broad frameworks, ideas, and strategies for engaging with what research and evidence suggest about giving, wellbeing, and human flourishing. Ultimately, the people “on the ground” — educators, students, families, organisations, and communities — can explore what these ideas mean in their own lives and contexts.
Take up what works for you. Question what doesn’t. Adapt, experiment, and make it your own.
We also don’t believe that people need to adopt a particular set of beliefs or terminology to benefit from these ideas. Whether you call it social concern, giving, being something for others, love, or something else entirely is less important to us than what these ideas mean and how they become relevant in your life.
What matters is not imposing a top-down approach from “experts” onto those assumed to know less, nor simply taking a bottom-up approach in which we each decide what everyone else should do based on personal preference. Instead, we’re interested in bringing different perspectives into conversation — research and lived experience, theory and practice, individual and collective perspectives — and exploring what becomes most relevant and helpful for particular people and communities at particular points in time.
We also recognise that ideas grow through sharing. The Curriculum of Giving brings together connections, perspectives, and ways of thinking that have emerged through our work and the work of many others. We encourage people to engage with these ideas, question them, adapt them, and take them into new contexts. Where our particular work or frameworks are used or shared, we simply ask that its origins are acknowledged.
So, use the Curriculum of Giving in whatever way you find most meaningful, exciting, or useful.
If this is so important, why haven’t I heard about it before?
There are probably a few answers to this.
For one, we’ve generally been “wallflowers”. We’ve tended to focus on the work rather than promoting ourselves or making it particularly public.
Much of it has been shared through Thomas’ teaching at the University of Canberra, where he has taught undergraduate and postgraduate teacher education students for more than two decades. Other parts have found their way into our academic publications.
So the ideas have been around for quite a while. They just haven’t necessarily been very visible beyond the classrooms and academic communities where they have developed.
There’s another reason too.
The Curriculum of Giving draws on ideas from many different disciplines and traditions. Generosity, relationships, compassion, flourishing, meaning, and living well are hardly new ideas. People have been thinking about these things for a very long time.
What can be harder to see are the connections between them.
We tend to put knowledge into separate boxes: education, philosophy, psychology, health, spirituality… Those distinctions can be useful, but they can also make it harder to see what different ways of thinking have in common.
Much of what we are trying to do is simply to bring some of those connections into view.
We’re not claiming that the ideas themselves are new. What is different is the way some of them are brought together and the questions that emerge when we look at them alongside one another.
There is a tension here, though.
We live in a world that values expertise and encourages us to develop something that is distinctly ours — our method, our framework, our approach. And expertise, evidence, and rigour matter.
But we don’t want the Curriculum of Giving to become another body of knowledge that people feel they have to accept, or something that belongs to us.
That would rather miss the point.
We can share what we have learned, point to research, make connections, and offer ideas. But ultimately, people need to encounter these things for themselves.
Try something. Notice what happens. See whether it makes sense in your life. Sometimes an idea resonates. Sometimes it challenges us. Sometimes it simply doesn’t fit for now.
That is why we are becoming more public about the Curriculum of Giving.
Not because we think we have all the answers, but because we think some connections are worth making visible — and worth exploring.
Perhaps we are all looking at the same mountain from different angles.
We’re simply inviting you to notice another view.
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Still curious?
Have a question we haven’t answered, or something here that has got you thinking?
We’d love to hear from you. Share your question, idea, or experience, and let’s explore it together.