Organizing curriculum change: an introduction

Outline

• Abstract
• Introduction
• State-Based Curriculum-Making
• Curriculum Commissions
• Research on State-Based Curriculum-Making
• Organizing Curriculum Change (occ): The Study
• Notes
• Disclosure Statement
• Funding
• Notes on Contributors
• References

Organizing curriculum change (OCC): The study

The OCC study emerged within this context. Haft and Hopmann (1990b) described the German ‘curriculum commission’ as a tool used primarily by Lander educational administrations to manage ideological exchanges between the public/political and educational/school systems. The perspective on state-based curriculum-making offered by Haft and Hopmann opens many new questions. They are questions that demand comparisons across times and jurisdictions. Thus, Haft and Hopmann’s formulation was embedded within a particular body of research in Germany and in the larger frame of the German perspective on curriculum theory and curriculum. The OCC study sought to explore the portability of Haft and Hopmann’s frame of reference by going beyond Germany to place the German analysis within a comparative perspective. This, in its turn, opened new questions given the recent widespread development of state-based curriculum-making. The OCC study was centred on episodes of state-based curriculum-making in the national school systems of Finland and Norway and sub-national (‘state’) jurisdictions in the federal states of Germany, Switzerland and US.

The papers that follow in this and subsequent issues of JCS begin the reporting of the OCC study. In the following papers, we examine the architecture and outcomes of the curriculum commissions that developed Norway’s Læreplanverket 1997 (L97; Royal Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs, 1999) and the Illinois Learning Standards (ILS) of 1997. The two commissions worked in very different contexts located at the opposite sides of the North Atlantic Ocean. Are there any similarities across the two cases? In a second set of papers we take as our starting point Basil Bernstein’s (1996; see also Singh, 2002) framework of the development of pedagogic discourse to consider how the curriculum writers within the seven commissions explored in the course of the OCC study responded to the principles of curriculum-making they were presented by their context. As Rosenmund (2000) notes, these studies began as single national or state cases of state-based curriculum-making. OCC, with its comparative and empirical cross-cultural focus, sought to explore the commonalities and differences across the cases – and in so doing illuminate the widely diffused institution of state-based curriculum-making.

We deal here with curriculum writing and curriculum writers as components of the larger framework of state-based curriculum-making. We do not examine or evaluate the introduction of these curricula to the schools and teachers or the use made by the curricula in teachers’ lesson planning. Our questions centre on the comparison of the sentiments of the curriculum writers within the set of commissions, and the structures and processes of curriculum development across a set of national and sub-national jurisdictions.