Conference Agenda

Recent curriculum policy, both in Europe and elsewhere, emphasizes the importance of teacher involvement in curriculum development (Priestley & Biesta, 2013), and research has showed that teachers are increasingly defined as key actors in education reform and are expected to participate in curriculum work to act as agents of change (Mølstad & Prøitz, 2018; Priestley et al., 2012). Traditionally, subject experts from higher education as well as government administrators have been the most important actors in curriculum development processes, as they are highly knowledgeable of the field and can often pull great political legitimacy (Levin, 2008), so this new development can be considered a shift in views where teacher agency and involvement have become more important (Priestley et al., 2016). Further, it is emphasized in reform implementation studies that teachers need ownership of a reform in order to implement the new curriculum into their practices (Aasen & Sandberg, 2010). Consequently, a logic advocating the importance of teacher involvement in curriculum development processes has spread (Kirk & MacDonald, 2001; Westbury, 2008). This shift underscores the importance of research into how these processes work and the influence and role teachers have in curriculum development.

This study focuses on a central part of curriculum development, namely government-appointed curriculum committees mandated to make recommendations for national curricula, which is a common way of organizing curriculum development in Europe. Research has shown that these committees have much influence on the final official curriculum (Westbury et al., 2016). As an example for study, this paper zooms in on a recent curriculum development process in Norway. In 2020, Norway introduced a new national curriculum, called the Knowledge Promotion Reform 2020 (LK20), where co-creation and partnerships with the education sector were important policy elements of the development process. Teachers, in particular, were encouraged to take part in the development to a larger extent than in previous reforms (Report to Parliament 28 (2015-2016)). The study aims to investigate teachers’ role in curriculum committees and their contribution to the development process and the final curriculum. The research question is What is teachers’ role in curriculum committees and how do they contribute to curriculum development through this involvement?

Theoretically the study is guided by the concepts compartmentalization, segmentation and licensing (Hopmann, 1991). Compartmentalization refers to the process of dividing large-scale curriculum processes into smaller, more manageable parts so that no one will be held accountable for the whole. Segmentation involves separating different discourse communities (e.g. political, public and professional) into smaller groups who share a common frame of reference when solving complex curriculum development tasks. This enables different stakeholders to give input but also keeping potential for conflict low. Licensing involves delegating parts of the decision making to teachers and school leaders (Mikser et al., 2016). This manner of organizing curriculum development enables central authorities to have control of the process, while at the same time satisfying stakeholders.

The realisation of large scale curriculum renewals' key ideas in teachers' practices has a name of being problematic (e.g., Cuban, 1988; Doyle & Ponder, 1997; Coburn, 2003; Van den Akker, 1998; Fullan, 2007). A common way for curriculum evaluators to investigate the occurrence of this implementation problem is to examine, for a given curriculum renewal project or reform, how closely teachers’ practices subsequent to the renewal activities correspond to the practices that the developers had in mind. This study focuses on the coherence between what curriculum innovations aim at, and what teachers want and do, respectively between written and enacted curricula (Stein et al., 2007; Thijs & Van den Akker, 2009), over a period of several decades of renewals. We use a perspective inspired by metaphors from evolution theory and ecology. We call key ideas in those curricula curriculum intentions, and view them as memes, the cultural equivalent of genes (Dawkins, 1976/2016), expressed over decades in different curricula, as in ecosystems. This perspective is also inspired by Fullan’s Interactive factors affecting implementation (Fullan, 2007, p.87) and a practicality ethic as described by Doyle and Ponder (1973).

The study also explores what factors may have facilitated or hindered such curriculum intentions to be expressed in today's enacted curricula. Categories used to analyse influences on teachers' practices were inspired by the teacher agency model of Priestley et al. (2013).

Central in this study is the case of upper secondary physics education in the Netherlands since 1970. Teachers in upper secondary education in the Netherlands have a great deal of freedom to shape their own curriculum, for example through the choice of textbooks and through the assessment of some of the national attainment targets in school-based exams. However, they are constrained by detailed national syllabi and exams, which cover 60% of the attainment targets.

Dutch physics education has been strongly influenced by science curriculum development projects in other countries, most prominently the American PSSC (Physical Science Study Committee) and Harvard Project Physics, the British Nuffield Science Teaching Project, and the German IPN’s Physik im Kontext. For these projects, as for Dutch projects, international literature on theories of knowledge and learning has also been influential.

The two research questions are the following:

1. To what extent do enacted curricula in upper general secondary physics education in the Netherlands reflect the intentions of renewals expressed in written curricula initiated since the 1970s?
2. What factors may have influenced the expression of the renewals’ intentions in teachers’ enacted curricula?

These questions reflect the aim of this study: to provide developers of large-scale curriculum renewals with insights that will help them organise the renewals so that their intentions are reflected in the enacted curricula. The study may also provide teachers with suggestions on how to influence large-scale innovations.

The curriculum intentions focused on had been identified in an analysis of six renewals since 1970. They are the following: Using contexts, Widening the scope of science education, Coordinating with other STEM subjects, Advancing concept development, and Advancing skills development.

The results of the analyses show that most of the renewals’ curriculum intentions have taken root in the teaching practices of most of the interviewed teachers. As prominent influencing factors appear: teacher education, continued professional development, previous classroom experiences, a diverse offer of resources, and, not surprisingly, the high-stake national exam system. Teachers' influence on renewals comes mainly from teachers participating as developers in renewal teams and from how developers process feedback from practising teachers.

The data show that the influences from unintended factors, including international projects and scientific literature, are not less significant than those from intended factors.

European Commission promotes equity, social cohesion, and active citizenship for improving the overall quality and efficiency of education systems (European Union). While appreciating this vision, education systems like Finland have used co-creation for developing its national education policy (Lähdemäki, 2019).

Curriculum co-creation is an innovative and inclusive process of curriculum design in which different stakeholders, such as students, staff members, school leaders, or parents become partners in the process of curriculum development. Bovil et al. (2020) defines it as a collaborative, reciprocal process of curriculum development in which all participants can contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualization, decision making, implementation, investigation, or analysis. Key benefits of this process include enhanced engagement and motivation; bolstered meta-cognitive awareness, a strong sense of identity; influx of fresh perspectives, and development of higher order thinking skills which eventually leads to improvement of student learning (Cook-Sather et al. 2014). Based on social-constructivist view of knowledge construction, this process provides voice and agency to stakeholders thereby leveraging their expertise and experiences in the process of curriculum design (Lubicz‑Nawrocka & Owen, 2022).

Curriculum co-creation has often been used in the sector of higher education for development of few courses predominantly in developed countries like the USA, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Scandinavia (Cook-Sather et al. 2014; Mercer-Mapstone et al., 2017). Research indicates that co-creation is often undertaken within the partnership projects that select small groups of privileged students. In contrast, co-creation involving a whole set of school teachers, academic leaders, curriculum researchers, university professors has been largely overlooked.

To democratise the process of curriculum design, following the guidelines advocated by India’s National Education Policy (GOI, 2020), one of the Indian states for the very first time undertook a comprehensive program of curriculum co-creation at systems level. This seemed essential in the country since innovations introduced in a top-down manner were rejected by the teachers as they considered it to be an imposition on to them by educational researchers and policy makers who are unaware of the classroom realities where reform is to be executed (Berry,et al., 2020). In such cases, high-quality innovations were implemented in ad-hoc manner (Cuban, 1998).

This research presents the case of curriculum co-creation in school education sector while Delhi (National Capital Territory of India) is working towards establishing a new board of school education called as Delhi Board of School Education (DBSE) using the technical expertise of Australian Council for Educational Research. DBSE curriculum designers co-created K-8 curriculum with school teachers which entailed three phases: designed curriculum, process curriculum, and reflected curriculum. Phase 1 (designed curriculum) involved identification of curricular goals at each stage, identification of curriculum designers, and developing requisite learning materials. Phase 2 (process curriculum) was the democratic process of knowledge construction in which epistemic collaborations were developed among curriculum researchers, pedagogic experts, assessment expert, school teachers, and domain leads. This phase involved collective review of curriculum designed in phase 1. The co-created curriculum emerging from this phase was implemented by school teachers in their respective classrooms. In phase 3 (reflected curriculum) feedback was collected from school teachers, students, and academic leaders to ascertain the effectiveness of the curriculum in the field.

This study attempts to understand the perspectives of participants associated with the process of curriculum co-creation. Situated in qualitative research traditions, using semi-structured interviews and focussed group discussions, this paper highlights the perspectives faced by different segments of individuals, ways in which they overcame various challenges to embed partnership and achieve shared ownership of the emergent curriculum. Also, it illustrates the increased satisfaction and professional development resulting from working in partnership.