ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates principles to make a curriculum innovation grow by describing two Dutch cases on science and technology education, in which the growth of the initial initiatives should acknowledge the schools’ and teachers’ ownership and identity. In both cases the innovation involves the improvement of science and technology in secondary education for the ability levels senior general secondary school (havo), and preuniversity education (vwo), age 12-18, both with similar perspectives and concerns: to inspire students for science and technology, to foster the students’ creativity, and to increase the students’ interest in future science and technology jobs. The cases adopt different routes: the development of a new school subject with a new identity in Technasium schools, and second, Nieuwe Scheikunde (New Chemistry) as the innovation of an existing subject (i.e., chemistry). In both developments we as authors were somehow, peripherally or more intensively, involved. Rather than interpreting curriculum innovation as an invention of a small group followed by a large-scale implementation, we consider curriculum innovation as a continuous process of growth and scaling up with interconnected professional learning communities as the basic unit. This chapter uses both case descriptions to identify underlying principles for curriculum innovation when considering curriculum innovation as shared learning of the whole system. We aim to formulate a new theoretical perspective and pose new questions, such that these may inspire a new perspective in science education research. Both curriculum innovations take place within the Dutch educational system, in which the pedagogy and the “what and how” of a curriculum are not prescribed by the Ministry of Education. The government describes a rough framework for several core school subjects, and regulates an examination system with a set of standards and norms for each subject organizing a central examination for most of the school subjects. The system sets the standards and norms that should be reached at the end, but the teachers and schools decide how these prescribed standards and norms can be acquired by the students at their schools. When several stakeholders decide that there is need for change, the basic reaction of the Ministry of Education is to rewrite the set of standards and norms for one or more subjects. This can be done by a small group of educators, teachers,
and other stakeholders, followed by a process of developing new exams based on the new standards. However, if substantial change is needed, another strategy is necessary. Science education is very much resistant to change, where groups, the academic discipline, factions, textbook writers, and so forth value their own education as a self-evident program. Eventually change in most cases implies small amendments, not an essential innovation, for example, science education that is appealing to students and lives up to the requirements of the 21st century (KNAW, 2003). An innovation strategy should have its lever at the point where real decision making takes place: in schools with teachers within their classrooms. Effective curriculum innovation cannot be an “invention” by a small group of educators, followed by a national and centralized “implementation.” Rather, curriculum innovation is the continuous professional development of teachers, schools, and educators (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Parke & Coble, 1997; Stolk, Bulte, De Jong, & Pilot, 2009a, 2009b). Not only in the Dutch decentralized educational system should the focus of curriculum innovation be on the professional development of teachers, this is also true for more centralized educational systems: there is no real change when change is not carried by the teachers, without them identifying themselves with a type of education for which they carry ownership. Therefore our starting point is that successful curriculum innovation of any kind needs a learning process of the whole system (Senge, 1990) which means shared learning within and between communities.
