Exploring diversity in the relationships between teacher quality and job satisfaction in the Nordic countries : insights from TALIS 2013 and 2018

B

Integral curriculum review in the Netherlands: In need of dovetail joints

This chapter addresses the balancing act between curriculum guidance and curriculum space against the backdrop of an integral curriculum review at the national/macro level in the Netherlands, labelled ‘Curriculum.nu’. As part of this review initiative many choices have to be made, reflecting answers to the following two questions: What balance is needed between curriculum regulation at the macro level on the one side and the provision of curricular space for schools at the meso and the micro level on the other? And, what are the related responsibilities of all involved in the educational system web in order to make the curriculum change efforts successful? Before getting to tentative answers, the chapter will provide an introduction to curriculum policy in the Netherlands and will offer an overview of the motives, aims, approaches and preliminary results of Curriculum.nu. The provisional answers include a set of research-informed principles for making the curriculum review efforts a success, including a call for dovetailing the various curriculum layers and for a strategic curriculum mix of room for school-specific decision-making, substantive guidance, support by exemplification and firm investments in professional development

Understanding curriculum making by teachers: implications for policy as text and as practice

Recent debates in curriculum studies have focused on the role of teachers as active curriculum makers. In this chapter, we argue for a more systematic approach to curriculum making as social practice. Our particular focus is on micro and nano curriculum making by teachers, that is curriculum making in schools and classrooms respectively, as curricular programmes are developed and enacted into practice. In making sense of these complex practices, we draw upon a theoretical typology for understanding and analysing curriculum making across different sites within education systems, and an ecological understanding of teacher agency. We apply these theoretical insights to the analysis of various influences on micro/nano curriculum, emerging from a range of recent empirical studies in five European education systems. In undertaking this analysis, we challenge prevalent notions of curriculum making as a linear process of delivery or implementation, instead seeking to understand it as interpretation and enactment across sites by multiple social actors, and tracing the multiple and dynamic connections that operate across sites and which shape micro and nano curriculum making in schools.</p

The nested systems of local school development: Understanding improved interaction and capacities in the different sub-systems of schools

In school systems around the world, there is an increasing focus on students’ academic achievement. The challenge of how to improve schools is an important issue for all levels in the school system. However, a central question of both practical and theoretical relevance is how it is possible to understand why (or why not) school-development efforts are successful. The purpose of this article is to explore the ecology of local school development through the case of a medium-sized municipality in Sweden, based on empirical data from two follow-up research projects. The analytical framework draws from organisational theory and new institutional theory, where focus is directed towards how different sub-systems of the school organisation interact with and respond to aspects of development work and the implications for outcomes of school-development initiatives. Findings show that great investment of resources from the central level in the local school organisation necessarily does not lead to changes in teaching practice. School-development initiatives are unlikely to be successful unless they engage and re-couple the involved sub-systems. Finally, we discuss how the introduction of Expert Teachers as a new sub-system has the ability to work as a link between other sub-systems and to promote school development.</p

Curriculum making and knowledge conceptions in classrooms in the context of standards-based curricula

This paper explores knowledge conceptions in teachers’ curriculum making within a classroom perspective through a lens of social realist theory. Curriculum making is conceptualized as a process that occurs between students, teachers, knowledge content, and contextual factors, in which teachers must balance various priorities and knowledge boundaries. The analytical distinctions between knowledge conceptions, boundaries, and structures are based on Young and Muller’s three future curriculum scenarios and applied to empirical data retrieved from two 8th-grade (14–15-year-olds) classrooms in Sweden regarding lessons on Swedish and the natural sciences. The findings show that the curriculum knowledge requirements impede the agency of teachers and shape conditions for curriculum making. Teachers seek to balance priorities in terms of the aim and content of subject knowledge, teaching activities, and their knowledge of the students. Conceptions of knowledge and boundaries are constructed in complex ways as teachers try to build bridges and engage in disciplinary boundary-crossing between subject-specific knowledge and knowledge from the world of students’ subjective experience. These movements and epistemic transactions in curriculum making are ways of integrating different knowledge structures, and they have the potential to encourage exploration and moving beyond social contexts and everyday experience.