Participation in national curriculum reform - coherence from complexity

Abstract

National curriculum reform is a complex negotiation point of how basic <br/>education should be practiced and what role it should take in society. The <br/>question of participation in this process is central to creating a coherent, <br/>responsible, and implementable curriculum—but still left for little investigation in the national level reforms. Our goal was to answer, how can <br/>participation in curriculum reform create coherent system-wide change in <br/>a complex education system? In this study, we approach the participative <br/>national Finnish Core Curriculum Reform 2014, through interviews of the <br/>reform steering group who acted as central stakeholders in the reform. We <br/>practiced a thinking with theory -oriented analysis and utilized Michel <br/>Callon’s four moments of translation as a theoretical framework to examine the interviews.<br/>Results illustrate how the moment of interessement leads to enrolment <br/>—how participation adds complexity to reforms but also offers an opportunity to build more coherent and lasting system-wide change from it <br/>during the processes of learning with and from each other. The results <br/>also provide us with a practical view on why coherent, lasting change <br/>cannot be authoritatively forced in a system, such as the education <br/>system, but is by its nature networked, collaborative and shared.