Session Information
03 SES 01, Enhancing Curriculum Design Capacity within Schools
Symposium
Contribution
To assist in creating a common sense of direction for education, the Dutch Ministry of Education initiated a country-wide debate. In 2016, the resulting overall vision for primary and secondary education will be elaborated at the national level. At the same time, schools are being invited to adapt their local curriculum in accordance with the vision and supplement it based on their local contexts. Past experiences show that the complexities that come with school-based curriculum development should not be underestimated. Teachers and school leaders continue to report substantive, socio-political and/or technical professional issues related to this task (cf. Goodlad, 1994; Law & Nieveen, 2010). Too often, we see teachers and team leaders struggle with curriculum design tasks for which they lack capacities. Part of these capacities are similar to those needed for teaching: subject matter knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills. However, to live up to the expectations of school-wide curriculum change, the school team needs to have curriculum expertise and design skills in their midst (cf. Huizinga, 2014; Nieveen & Van der Hoeven, 2011). In this study we analysed the opportunities teachers and school leaders have to acquire and expand their curriculum expertise and design skills during initial teacher education programmes, induction programmes and continuing professional development. The analysis framework depicts a variation in design duties from the perspective of the three perspectives (substantive, socio-political and technical-professional) and builds on a typology of curriculum design tasks of Marsh, Day, Hannay and McCutcheon (1990). The paper draws upon qualitative data generated from one-to-one interviews with program coordinators, teacher trainers and students and document analysis. Findings show that the preparation of teachers and school leaders needs improvement in order to better fit the high expectations related to curriculum redesign by school leaders and teachers. Against the background of the concept of teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015), we will discuss next steps in levering professional development opportunities in pre- and in-service education and the need for school leaders and teachers to critically consider what ambitions for curriculum renewal would be achievable for their schools when taking into account the curricular capacity of the team and the support they can get from resources, individuals and professional networks.
References
Goodlad, J. (1994). Curriculum as a field of study. In T. Husén, & T.N. Postlethwaite (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of education (pp. 1262–1267). Oxford: Pergamon. Huizinga, T. (2014). Developing curriculum design expertise through teacher design teams. Proefschrift. Enschede: Universiteit Twente. Law, E.H.-F., & Nieveen, N. (Eds.) (2010). Schools as curriculum agencies: Asian and European perspectives on school-based curriculum development. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Marsh, C., Day, C., Hannay, L., & McCutcheon, G. (1990). Reconceptualizing school-based curriculum development. Bristol, UK: Falmer Press. Nieveen, N., & Hoeven, M. van der (2011). Building the curricular capacity of teachers: Insights from the Netherlands. In P. Picard & L. Ria (Eds.), Beginning teachers: A challenge for educational systems - CIDREE Yearbook 2011 (pp. 49-64). Lyon, France: ENS de Lyon, Institut Français de l’Éducation. Priestley, M., Biesta, G., & Robinson, S. (2015). Teacher Agency: An Ecological Approach. London: Bloomsbury.
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