Conference Agenda

This workshop introduces the methodology of Design Based Research (Brown, 1992; Plomp & Nieveen, 2013) to map how the team, composed from universities in the Netherlands and Ireland, hope to answer the question: What supportive semiotic, material, and social flows do teachers need in order to engage in the process of curriculum making across the continuum of their career.

The teachers’ role has become highly complex in employing their professional judgement as they face the challenges of the UN sustainable development goals, the velocity of technological change, emerging new curricula (Priestley & Biesta, 2013) and the complexity of new approaches to pedagogy (Doll, 1993). One of the greatest challenges for the teacher is becoming a curriculum maker (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992). Curriculum making may be defined as an “interactive and non-linear process that occurs and flows across various contexts and sites” (Priestley, Philippou, Alvunger & Soini, 2021, p. 273) and engages actors “who interpret, translate, mediate and enact policy through the exercise of professional judgements” (Priestley & Xenofontos, 2021). This understanding of curriculum making recognises the teacher’s role as highly networked and connective, nesting in the wider ecological social system of the school and society and connected to the other sites of curriculum making (Priestley et al. 2022).

The supporting needs and infra-structure to develop teachers’ curriculum making agency and capacity, developed over the continuum of their career, are the foci of this workshop. It offers participants an overview of possible pathways teachers may take in their career (Figure 1). It proposes that this framework can help teachers to navigate their career and that school leaders can use it to support career development and to identify career possibilities within their school.

Figure 1:A model of the framework by Snoek, De Wit & Dengerink,(2020) will be proffered here

Figure 2 depicts the diversification of design tasks from the perspective of three dimensions: substantive (what), socio-political (with whom) and technical-professional (how) (Nieveen & van der Hoeven, 2011; De Vries, Nieveen, & Huizinga, 2020). It zooms in on the importance of teacher agency (Priestley, Biesta & Robinson, 2015), and sees the professional development of the teacher as a curriculum maker as both moving up and along by becoming an expert teacher, moving sideways by adding new roles to the role of classroom teacher (in this case that of becoming a designer) and from the middle, connecting and adding layers of system (by taking design roles at team, school, regional or national settings). Throughout this progression of a teacher’s career, they engage in a process of knowledge making which can be described as an arranging, organizing, and fitting together a multiplicity of components in relation to curriculum (Thijs & van den Akker, 2009).

Figure 2: Framework of Curriculum Design Pathways for Teachers

The success of this process depends on the synergy of three types of flow: semiotic, material, and social (Deleuze and Guattari, 2003, p.22). These three flows must work simultaneously, to bring about transformation or reterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003). The semiotic flow is concerned with curriculum ideology, concepts, language, and communication. The material flow is made up of content such as the physical structures, documents, artefacts. How these work together through relationships, pedagogy and collaboration makes up the social flow (Dempsey, Doyle & Looney, 2021). This workshop requests participants to apply these three flows to the five different stages of curriculum design proficiency possibly undertaken by a teacher over their career (Figure 2). Each of these three flows, their fluidity and viscosity, will be applied to important questions: what do teachers’ design? With whom do they design and how do they design?