Topic:

In today’s European educational landscape, teacher autonomy, together with different conceptions of what ‘freedom’ in the teaching profession may be, are a central issue (Parker, 2015). While many authors point to the erosion of teachers’ professional autonomy in the classroom, due to increasingly stringent norms of public accountability and broadened collective teachers’ responsibilities (Maxwell et al., 2019), work in organizational psychology points to the crucial role of teachers’ autonomy in increasing both teachers’ performance and well-being in the profession (Peng et al., 2022). Policy attempts to increase the autonomy of schools and teachers give rise to paradoxes and tensions (EC, 2008).

In a Flemish practice-oriented study, we focus on possible increased didactic teacher autonomy in the context of a Flemish curricular ‘free space’ and a recent reform of secondary education.

Since 2004, some lesson hours per week in the Flemish secondary school curriculum are a priori undesignated. The hours of this so-called ‘free space’ are not a priori associated to specific school subjects and are free from the obligation to realize ministerial mandatory goals. Individual schools have the right to use these hours according to their own educational vision, independently from ministerial obligations. Therefore, teachers teaching in the hours of the free space could in principle work and experiment without the urgency of the mandatory curriculum and inspection controls (Van den Branden, 2016).

The recent reform (‘modernization’) of Flemish secondary education, started in 2019, maintained this concept by organizing curriculum in ‘general educational’, ‘specific’ and ‘complementary’ components, the latter replacing the free space (FMET 1999, 2023). Depending on the study direction, two to four hours per week are complementary and can thus be filled in freely by the school.

One aim of the reform was to increase autonomy of schools and teachers. In this context, the obligation to realize the mandatory targets via specific school subjects has been removed. At the same time, in particular in technical and vocational education, the amount and depth of general education goals have been increased. According to contacts in schools, this resulted in putting under pressure the specific component and, in turn, the free space. In fact, while schools can in principle fill in the complementary hours according to their own vision, in practice they might have to use them to realize general goals they find no time for elsewhere, or to give some space back to the specific component, being the one for which students have specifically chosen (i.e. the wood working hours in carpentry school).

This observation became the stimulus for a practice-oriented study with focus on the curricular free space in Flemish secondary schools (Tamassia & Ardui, 2025).

Research questions:

1) Which learning activities do Flemish secondary schools organize in the ‘free space’?

2) Which of these learning activities allow for a different didactic approach in the ‘free space’, and how?

3) Do concepts of ‘didactics of the free space’ emerge from observations and interviews in schools?

Objective:

By mapping how schools fill in the free space, and by describing practices where this curricular freedom converts to didactic freedom for teachers, this study aims at a didactics-oriented reflection on policies aiming at ‘more autonomy’ for schools and teachers. 

Conceptual framework:

The Actor-network theory is an inspiring conceptual framework for our work (Fenwick, Edwards, 2010). We start from the idea that the learning activities in the ‘free space’ of a school result from the complex interactions of a network of actors inside and outside the school. Whether ‘autonomy’ granted by policy is eventually translated into increased didactic freedom in the classroom, and how, is a ‘black box’ we want to open.

The study is structured with three phases: 1) orientation: study of policy documents and preliminary interviews with actors in secondary schools; 2) desk-research: study based on websites of schools / major school networks; 3) field-research: classroom observations and interviews with school practice actors. While phases 1 and 2 have been completed, phase 3 is currently running. In phase 1 the definition of the concept of ‘free space’ was extracted from policy documents. Then, in preliminary interviews in schools, school managers were asked how the school fills in the hours of the free space, and why. The mentioned learning activities of the free space turned out not to be fully correct, compared to the information on the school website. In fact, the concrete realization of the free space appeared as a kind of ‘black box’. In phase 2, inspired by work in the context of the Actor-network theory where online retrieved information is used to open a ‘black box’ (Latour 1987, 2000) (Venturini 2012), we devised a method to systematically extract the learning activities organized by schools in the free space. We compared the lesson timetables on the school website with the ‘model timetables’ published by the network of schools to which the individual school belongs (school year 2023-24). The model timetable is a concrete suggestion of how the school week can be organized for a specific study direction, and gives the number of hours for the different school subjects and the number of hours of the free space. This model is offered by the networks as a support to schools, despite the fact that the reform of secondary education has removed the obligation the organize learning with specific school subjects. In the great majority of the cases, the school had followed the suggested scheme almost entirely, allowing us by subtraction to find out how the hours of the free space had been filled in. With this technique we studied 40 cases, for general, technical and vocational secondary education in a diversity of schools, exemplarily in the areas of STEM and Economy and organization. In the data-analysis we highlighted trends and identified exceptions. In phase 3, we selected cases pointing to the possibility of different forms of teaching and learning, for which we are currently planning classroom observations and interviews with teachers, students and other school actors. At ECER we will report on the results of this phase as well.

The partial results from the desk-research phase point to a ‘free space’ that does not appear to be ‘freer than the rest’ for didactic experimentation by teachers, or for teachers’ autonomous decisions on educational goals, a seemingly paradoxical result in the perspective of the reform. In the desk-research data we identified the following trends: 1) Open organizations of teaching and learning, like project hours or seminars, appear to be absent in the great majority of the studied cases. 2) The hours of the free space are typically not used in block, but assigned one by one to specific subjects, being in most cases already present in the weekly timetable. This suggests that some teachers get more time to realize the mandatory goals for their subject, but will very likely not teach differently in the added extra hour. Of course, having more time does have an impact on didactical choices, and might imply, in a restricted sense, a form of increased didactic freedom. 3) Concerning where the extra hours go, we identified three main scenarios: giving extra space to the specific component (i.e. STEM technical / vocational); increasing the student’s chance of success in higher education (i.e. by adding academic language and statistics); strengthening the student’s profile for the job market (i.e. by adding more English and IT-skills). Only rarely we encountered cases where at least part of the free space was used to add something new, like one hour of art & culture of an extra modern language, that did not fall under the mandatory goals. These partial results and their current interpretation will be further tested and elaborated upon in the ongoing field-research phase, with which we also aim at identifying and describing practices where teachers have different layers of increased ‘didactic autonomy’ in the free space.

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