Abstract
The success or otherwise of mandated curriculum reform policy has been widely discussed within the literature (e.g. Cuban in Teachers College Record 99: 453–477, 1998). A major issue is the ‘implementation gap’ (Supovitz and Weinbaum in The Implementation gap: understanding reform in high schools. Teachers College Press, New York, pp. 1–21, 2008) between policy intention and classroom practice, due to the potential for teachers to significantly modify the intrinsic logics of the curriculum policy to match the institutional logics of the setting where it is enacted (Young in The curriculum of the future: from the “new sociology of education” to a critical theory of learning. Routledge, London, 1998).
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Notes
- 1.
The authors draw upon the metaphor of the flipped classroom—where processes are turned around to give primacy to learners—in calling for a system where the primary role in shaping curriculum and pedagogy should rest with teachers, rather than politicians and administrators.
- 2.
Please note that we employ the spelling most commonly used in Scotland, namely ‘enquiry’, throughout this paper, except where quoting directly from other authors using the alternative spelling ‘inquiry’.
- 3.
The Four Capacities of CfE have become a sort of mantra for the new curriculum, widely visible as slogans on posters in schools, but often stripped of meaning. In fact, they form a useful starting point for curriculum planning, being broken down into a set of key competencies known as attributes and capabilities, which define the skills and knowledge to be acquired by an education person. See: http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/learningandteaching/thecurriculum/whatiscurriculumforexcellence/thepurposeofthecurriculum/index.asp.
- 4.
This job was made considerably easier in 2013–14, when the General Teaching Council for Scotland subscribed to an EBSCO database, enabling teachers to access a range of research articles in peer-reviewed journals.
- 5.
For an extended discussion of these dimensions of agency—the chordal triad—see Emirbayer and Mische (1998).
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Acknowledgements
We wish to acknowledge the enthusiastic participation of around 75 teachers and senior managers over the three years of the project. We also wish to offer our thanks and appreciation to East Lothian Council, particularly Alison Wishart for her support in making this programme happen.
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Priestley, M., Drew, V. (2017). Teacher Sense-Making in School-Based Curriculum Development Through Critical Collaborative Professional Enquiry. In: Peters, M., Cowie, B., Menter, I. (eds) A Companion to Research in Teacher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4075-7_52
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