The New Zealand Curriculum and preservice teacher education: Public document, private perceptions

Abstract

Abstract The development of The New Zealand Curriculum from 2000 to 2007, including the initial review that gave rise to the stocktake, the development of the draft curriculum, and the production of the final curriculum, are reviewed and analysed from the standpoint of preservice teacher education. Particular attention is paid to the way the initial goal of creating a less-crowded was augmented as certain elements (vision, principles, key competencies, future-focused themes, values) came to assume increasing prominence in a process of complexification. Twenty challenging questions for teacher education in the future (its purposes, structure, culture, and ways of operating) emerge, and are reviewed in the context of New Zealand's Graduating Teacher Standards. Introduction American educator Lee Shulman's visions now permeate everyday discourses about teaching (Palmer, 2001, p. 261). He is especially renown for his seven-part catalogue of teachers' knowledges, which prominently includes curriculum knowledge, with particular grasp of the materials and programmes that serve as 'tools of the trade' for (Shulman, 1987, p. 8). Curriculum, of course, does not necessarily pertain to a national document (McGee, 1997, pp. 9-14), but the implementation of The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007) presents a clear challenge for our colleges, faculties, and schools of education. In fact, in the spirit of Shulman, a required standard for our graduating teachers (New Zealand Teachers' Council, 2007, p. 1) includes having knowledge of the relevant documents of Aotearoa. Preparatory groundwork for The New Zealand Curriculum began in 2000 with a review, which culminated in the publication of a research-based stocktake report in 2002 (McGee, 2008, p. 76). Over the next three years the existing New Zealand framework (Ministry of Education, 1993c) was reworked; groups reassessed each learning area; and special projects, working in parallel, investigated aspects such as principles, values, skills, and competencies, links between sectors, and designing school curriculum. The New Zealand Curriculum was released in November 2007. In this article I take the liberty of briefly reviewing some of my private perceptions over the period of the development of The New Zealand Curriculum, during which time I was involved in the science education and environmental education areas, values, and key competencies. As a preservice teacher educator, I document the emerging issues as I saw them, and I gather these together to pose 20 questions, grouped under the generic sections of The New Zealand Curriculum (vision, principles, values, key competencies, etc.) that are already engaging--or soon will engage--the attention of preservice teacher educators. Finally, the range and scope of the 20 questions are cast against the requirements of the Graduating Teacher Standards. 2000-02: The New Zealand review This two-year review period initiated the process that culminated in the publication of The New Zealand Curriculum in 2007. My initial response was one of ambivalence about the targeted publication date, 2007. Time is a two-edged sword in educational change processes: allow too little time and outcomes may be hasty and under researched; allow too much time and a lack of urgency may result in the time scale for change being engulfed by the momentum of faster moving societal and technological changes. Therefore, on the one hand I found the possibility of widespread, research-based consultation laudable, but on the other hand I noted the huge time interval from 2007 back to the late 1980s, the period that had given rise to the diverse philosophies that underpinned the early parts of the existing framework (Ministry of Education, 1993c), the maths (Ministry of Education, 1992), and the science (Ministry of Education, 1993a). …