Over the past two decades, there has been a growing focus on supervision, documentation requirements, and the implementation of a national quality assessment system in Norway (Tveit, 2014). Recent curriculum reforms, such as the Subject Renewal (LK20), emphasize learning outcomes by specifying competence goals, enhancing benchmarking and fostering competition within schools and regions, as well as internationally (Prøitz, 2015). Over the past 20 years, in alignment with global trends set by international organizations such as the OECD, the Norwegian national curriculum has transitioned from a knowledge-based to a competence-based approach, emphasizing competence goals and basic skills (Sundby & Karseth, 2022).

Mølstad (2015), based on Hopman (2003), identifies two traditions of curriculum control in the Norwegian national curriculum since the early 2000s. These traditions help us understand curriculum change and the role of teachers in curriculum making. The process control tradition emphasizes teaching methods and processes, granting teachers freedom to choose content and methods within overarching plans and frameworks. This tradition values didactic thinking and pedagogical legitimacy. In this tradition, the curriculum can be seen as a tool that promotes teacher agency. The product control tradition focuses on teaching and learning objectives, emphasizing learning outcomes and monitoring through testing. Here, teachers are expected to meet specific student learning outcomes and improve test performance, and the curriculum can be seen as a tool that limits teacher agency.

The aim of this research is to explore how teachers from Inland Norway exercise their agency within the curriculum to achieve the learning outcomes set by the Subject Renewal reform (LK20). The research question is: How does teachers’ agency manifest in their planning and teaching under the Subject Curriculum Renewal (LK20)?

Theoretically, this investigation is grounded in the concept of teacher agency, which refers to teachers’ reflective responses to various situations in their daily school life (Priestley et al., 2015). Studying teacher agency provides insights into how teachers balance national standards with their professional judgment to meet students’ experiences, needs, and interests. Teacher agency highlights how teachers' reflective practices and decisions help achieve learning outcomes set by the curriculum. Examining teachers’ perceptions of curriculum work reveals the challenges and opportunities they face in achieving agency despite benchmarking and competition. This understanding is crucial for creating policies and practices that support teachers as curriculum developers and promote meaningful and creative teaching and learning.

This research employs a theoretical framework of teacher agency (Lennert da Silva & Mølstad, 2020) to investigate how teachers adapt the curriculum to meet students’ needs and contexts. This involves both adapting teaching practices and resisting measures that conflict with their professional judgment and values. The model includes four categories: (1) play it safe, (2) go with the flow, (3) changing rules, and (4) resisting. Categories 1 and 2 do not represent agency, while 3 and 4 do. In the first category, teachers follow rules without considering their implications. In the second, they internalize rules without assessing the pros and cons of curriculum frameworks. In the third, teachers modify rules to suit their purposes and students’ experiences and needs based on their professional judgments and values. In the fourth, teachers resist rules that do not align with their professional judgments and values, avoiding engagement with policy. This framework will be applied to analyze data from interviews and teaching plans.

This research will interview at least four teachers working in primary and/or lower-secondary education in Inland Norway. The subjects will include at least two, such as Norwegian and Mathematics. This investigation will refer to the core curriculum, which sets the overarching goals for education, emphasizing the development of pupils’ competences and knowledge. It will also explore subject curricula, focusing on core elements, competence goals, and basic skills. Teachers will be asked to share their teaching plans to explore links between the curriculum text and their teaching plans and practices. The interview guide will be semi-structured, combining predefined questions with the flexibility to explore topics in more depth based on the interviewee’s responses. (Clark et al., 2021). The topics will focus on how teachers align the core elements of subjects with competence goals, using key examples from the LK20 curriculum. For example: 1. The open linkage between core elements and competence goals, meaning there is no specific guidance on connecting them in teaching and learning (Karseth, 2019). 2. The variability in the specificity of competence goals, with some being very specific and content-related, while others are vague and open to interpretation (Lennert da Silva & Mølstad, 2024). These examples suggest that while the curriculum provides directions and frameworks, it also allows for interpretation and flexibility, enabling teachers to exercise their agency. Including questions related to these examples in the interview guide will help explore how teachers’ agency manifests in their planning and teaching under the Subject Curriculum Renewal (LK20). The data will be analyzed using thematic analysis (Ryan & Bernard, 2003; Clarke & Braun, 2017), where themes serve as a framework for organizing and presenting the researcher’s analytical observations. The goal of thematic analysis is not merely to summarize the data but to identify and interpret significant features, focusing on addressing the research question (Clarke & Braun, 2017, p. 297). The analysis will center on how teachers operationalize competence goals and facilitate the realization of the LK20 curriculum’s goals through their planning and teaching.

The expected outcomes may indicate that teachers have significant freedom and influence in planning and realizing their teaching. They might also have the freedom and legitimacy to address individual pupils’ experiences and needs. This study will explore situations where teachers exercise agency and/or have the capacity to do so, using a theoretical framework of teacher agency. Additionally, it aims to show that curriculum work can be seen not only as a means to achieve competence goals but also as a creative process. The research will examine teachers’ agency in planning and realizing teaching within the state frameworks provided by the curriculum, highlighting areas where teachers exercise agency and transform the curriculum into a living document, as well as areas where they have the opportunity to do so. This study aims to highlight teacher agency in curriculum work and how teachers use their professional judgment to interpret the curriculum and develop their teaching to best meet students’ experiences, needs, and interests.

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