Abstract
For many years, teachers have been involved in developing the national curricula in Finland in various ways. Teachers’ involvement in curriculum design and implementation has, during the last national curriculum implementation process, increased locally to strengthen their confidence in and knowledge of the national curriculum’s multifaceted content. The purpose of this article is to broaden the knowledge of teacher involvement in the recent curriculum process in Finland; more specifically, to examine teachers’ participation in local curriculum work. In this qualitative study, interviews were the primary method used to gather empirical data. Hansén’s (1998) ideas of different levels of teacher professionalization are used as a framework for the analysis. The results show that ways of organizing involvement, management of involvement and use of time in the local curriculum process are crucial factors in teachers’ participation and partly determine their degree of participation. The results also suggest that teachers’ awareness of how the curriculum is linked to their collective collaborative and continuous work is relatively high, but it is not entirely clear how the four steps are integrated in the professional language.
Highlights
Teachers are perhaps the most important players in achieving high quality in school development
The results are presented as five different analyses of the teachers and principals’ participation at the five schools included in the study. This design was chosen in order to demonstrate the differences and similarities found between the schools and to illustrate how the local work is done differently and how this affects the teachers’ different opportunities to participate in local curriculum work
How the five municipalities’/schools’ local work is organized is a way to exemplify the variation in local curriculum work conditions that appeared, and to show that, even without national guidelines, similarities can still be found in the practices
Summary
Teachers are perhaps the most important players in achieving high quality in school development. Teacher engagement and knowledge are crucial for pupils to develop the knowledge and skills needed to succeed academically (cf Sahlberg, 2015), and teachers’ engagement determines students’ success. Teachers’ views on their work, of themselves as teachers and of the conditions under which they carry out their duties impact how their work is expressed. Teachers’ participation in local curriculum work is examined, with attention to quality implementation, pupils’ knowledge development and teachers’ professional development, each embedded in the analysis presented. As a framework for this study, curriculum work is considered a way for teachers to develop professionally, to enhance their curriculum knowledge and influence their everyday practices, which can contribute to their enjoyment of their pedagogical work and positively affect quality implementation of the curriculum
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