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Conceptualizing the curriculum enactment process in mathematics education

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Abstract

This article explores the following question: What does it mean to enact curriculum? In order to do so, it offers a conceptualization of the enacted curriculum and situates it within a curriculum policy, design, and enactment system. The system depicts the formal and operational domains in which curricular aims and objectives are developed and curriculum plans formulated and enacted. The authors situate the enacted mathematics curriculum in the operational part of the system and define it as the interactions between teachers and students around mathematical tasks of a lesson and collection of lessons, but argue that understanding what it means to enact curriculum involves examining the many places within the system that curricular elements are translated and transformed. The authors describe each of the articles in this special issue with respect to the framework.

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Notes

  1. Initial work conceptualizing this framework was undertaken by a team of participants at the Research on the Enacted Mathematics Curriculum Conference in November 2010. The team included Kathryn Chval, Marta Civil, Cassie Freeman, Daniel Heck, Beth Herbel-Eisenmann, Mary Ann Huntley, Karen King, Janine Remillard, Jo Ellen Roseman, Jeff Shih, Deborah Spencer, and Mary Kay Stein. As authors of the current paper, we have developed the framework further, but have drawn heavily on the ideas and insights of colleagues listed here. An earlier version of the framework, which focused specifically on the US system, was published in the edited volume Enacted Mathematics Curriculum (Thompson & Usiskin 2014).

  2. The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) used a systemic model of educational opportunity developed for the Second International Study of Mathematics (McKnight, 1979).

  3. The September, 2013, special issue of ZDM was devoted to textbook research in mathematics education, ZDM—The international Journal on Mathematics Education, 45(5).

  4. Adapted from Remillard & Heck, (2014).

  5. See Remillard and Heck (2014) for an elaborated model of the enacted curriculum.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Janine T. Remillard

  2. Horizon Research, Inc., 326 Cloister Ct., Chapel Hill, NC, 27514, USA

    Daniel J. Heck

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  1. Janine T. Remillard
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  2. Daniel J. Heck
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Correspondence to Janine T. Remillard.

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Remillard, J.T., Heck, D.J. Conceptualizing the curriculum enactment process in mathematics education. ZDM Mathematics Education 46, 705–718 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-014-0600-4

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