Curriculum Making: A conceptual framing (original) (raw)
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Conclusions: Patterns and Trends in Curriculum Making in Europe
Curriculum Making in Europe: Policy and Practice within and Across Diverse Contexts
This chapter provides a summary and a concluding discussion on the main findings from the different cases and chapters throughout this volume. The chapter revisits the approach on curriculum making as non-linear and as framed around a conceptualisation of interrelated sites of activity-supra, macro, meso, micro and nano-presented in the introduction. A central conclusion of this book is that the meso site of activity stands out as critical for current developments within curriculum making, both in terms of a transformed role for the nation state in macro curriculum making, as well as implications of policy flows and processes from the supra site of activity. Based on our observations, we suggest an elaborated model for understanding curriculum making, with special attention to the significance of meso curriculum making and teacher agency. In the final part of the conclusions, we argue that there are a number of lessons to be learned from curriculum making in the European context. In line with the significance of meso curriculum making observed throughout the volume, we emphasize the importance of middle ground and mobility, the necessity of participatory curriculum making, and that systems of accountability need to be based on trust. We also underline the importance of a delicate balance concerning regulation-providing support, guidance and steering-together with a critical awareness of destructive as well as progressive forces for maintaining and providing the agency of the educational system for good curriculum making.
Curriculum making as social practice: complex webs of enactment
The Curriculum Journal, 2018
This special issue brings together papers that individually and collectively illustrate the complexities which emerge when curriculum is 'made'; complexities which themselves stem from the social embeddedness of both curriculum as a concept and the social actors involved in such makings. The papers all have their genesis in presentations given at the 3 rd European Conference on Curriculum Studies, held over two days at the University of Stirling in June 2017. The papers, and the conference, are representative of a much needed renaissance in curriculum studies, at least in Europe, with the recent formation of the European Association for Curriculum Studies, and where the European Educational Research Association Network 3 Curriculum Innovation has greatly enhanced its profile and membership in recent years. This renaissance follows an extended period since the 1980s, often termed a crisis in curriculum (e.g. Wheelahan, 2010), and marked by a decline in curriculum scholarship and the emergence of so-called teacher-proof national curricula around the world (e.g. Taylor, 2013).
2013
The widespread government involvement in curriculum reform has made curriculum policy a popular research topic. The traditional understanding of curriculum policy refers to policy in text that displays the formal intent or authorative statement of government in “contextuality” (Lasswell, 1951). However, curriculum policy is never a static or linear snapshot of the context; it is practically a distributed social constructive process of sense-making and re-making with the changing context. Curriculum policy is continuously reconstructed and evolved as it transfers among contextualized localities (Ball, 2006), differentiated groups and individuals in action. The focus of the article is to reveal the tension and complexity of curriculum policy in action with the sense of time and space. The analysis takes the 10+ years’ curriculum policy change in Chinese context as an exemplar. The first clue of the analysis is to examine the travels of curriculum policy in China from central governmen...
A Discourse on Curriculum Theory
Drawing a comparison between philosophers and artists Bertrand Russell (1950: 159) asserts that teachers likewise may only perform properly through internal creative impulse rather than being fettered by external authority. Whether this position rings true is likely a matter of perspective on the nature of education. Regardless, structured curriculum endures and continues to be the driving force that underpins the delivery of education in the UK. However, what makes an educational curriculum is a subject of ongoing debate. Indeed, Tummons (2009: 4) quite rightly contends that the word curriculum itself is too vague, broad and far reaching to be useful in any genuinely helpful way. Therefore, in this essay I will explore the two predominant models of curriculum planning with the view of analysing their efficacy and suitability in enabling truly educational curriculum. This will require theoretical and ideological consideration of what education is to mean in our democratic society. From the outset I assert the product model to be deficient in enabling a truly educational curriculum concluding the process model most accurately reflects this concept. I will discuss the curriculum as it is today and conclude that whilst guised as learner-centred and adhering to holistic process principles it is in fact an overtly objective, product based curriculum. Further to this I will discuss the possible impact of using such a model of curriculum in the contemporary FE sector.
State-based curriculum-making, Part I
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2016
This paper frames the problem underlying the cross-cultural Organizing Curriculum Change (OCC) study of state-based curriculummaking. The paper discusses the increased use by states over the past two decades of the century-old instrument of the state-based curriculum and the tool of the curriculum commission. The paper contrasts the slender English-language writing on these institutions with the extensive German literature, with particular emphasis on the post-1970s German analysis and the revisionist analysis of the 1980s. Syllabus documents stand between public curriculum debate and political party platforms and the practice of curriculum delivery in schools, and elsewhere. Syllabus documents are a pivot point that mediates practice and political platforms with public dialogue. Connelly and Connelly (2008) As was noted in the previous paper in JCS (Westbury et al., 2016), state-based curriculummaking has been the mechanism for governing and steering curricula and teaching in many school systems since their foundation. But, over the past two decades, state curriculummaking has been adopted (or re-adopted) as a new activity by school systems that had never used (or long ago abandoned) formal state-based curricula. And what had been, at other times, an activity only undertaken every decade or so has become an ongoing activity of many ministries (see Rosenmund, 2006; and International Bureau of Education, 2001). In addition, state curriculum-making yielding 'national' curricula or standards is being undertaken by central governments in federal states-as in, for example, Australia, Canada, the US, Switzerland and Germany-that do not have formal, constitutional authority over schooling in their nations. Such state curriculum-making can, of course, be very dramatic in its impact, particularly when it is undertaken in the light of (or because of) major shifts in the ideologies and structures of schooling-as seen, for example, in the UK 'national curriculum' of the 1980s or the US 'standards movement' of the 1990s with their links to mandatory system-wide assessment. But state curriculum-making is also significant as a routine educational and administrative activity of many ministries and boards of education as they support and ratify ongoing revisions and changes in subject areas and courses of study. It lies at the heart of the leadership of their schools by ministries, departments and/or boards of education (see
Europe, transnational curriculum movements and comparative curriculum theorizing
European Educational Research Journal
This reflective essay on the papers in this special issue of EERJ on Northern European curriculum analysis discusses issues of comparison and scale, and the significance of global and local specificities in curriculum research. Drawing on comparative examples from outside Europe, the essay draws attention to some commonalities of the European positioning from which these analyses begin, in particular the questions about governance, policy process and constructions of citizenship engendered today both by the formation of the EU and by the impact of OECD activities on it. The article argues the need to recognize different types of curriculum analyses and purposes, and particularly the salience of both big picture and closer-up detailed perspectives, and discusses the contribution these articles make to addressing both. It considers further issues about two matters raised by these contributions: the significance of moves to more competency and outcomes-centred curriculum forms, and the...
State-based curriculum work and curriculum-making: Norway’sLæreplanverket 1997
Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2016
This case study of the development of the Norwegian compulsory school curriculum of 1997, Laereplanverket 1997, parallels a study of the development of the Illinois Learning Standards of 1997. The pair of case studies is designed to explore the administration of state-based curriculum-making and, in particular, the use in curriculum-making of the administrative tools of compartmentalization, segmentation and licencing. Often the use of these tools serves to make the curriculum as a guiding instrument largely symbolic and/or ideological. A shared knowledge base is the core in a national network of communication between the members of a democratic community … Education [plays] the principal part in passing on this shared background information-the education everybody has to be familiar with to remain a democratic society and the members of the society empowered.
A comparative research project is being implemented to describe how curriculum guidelines are developed and applied in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, and to compare the underlying structures and strategies that influence and determine curriculum work and curriculum-making at different levels of decision making and enactment. This paper describes the project as it is unfolding in Norway. The expectation is that political, programmatic, and practical levels of decision making will be examined. The extensive education reform effort in Norway at this time is characterized as a systemic reform, and as a curriculum-driven systemic reform that implies coherence among school types nationally. This implies a nationally mandated curriculum developed in a political context. At the programmatic level, the reform involves the construction of a core curriculum, principles and guidelines for compulsory schooling, and syllabuses for the subjects taught in elementary and lower se...