Participation in national curriculum reform - coherence from complexity

Abstract

National curriculum reform is a complex negotiation point of how basic education should be practiced and what role it should take in society. The question of participation in this process is central to creating a coherent, responsible, and implementable curriculum—but still left for little investigation in the national level reforms. Our goal was to answer, how can participation in curriculum reform create coherent system-wide change in a complex education system? In this study, we approach the participative national Finnish Core Curriculum Reform 2014, through interviews of the reform steering group who acted as central stakeholders in the reform. We practiced a thinking with theory -oriented analysis and utilized Michel Callon’s four moments of translation as a theoretical framework to examine the interviews.Results illustrate how the moment of interessement leads to enrolment—how participation adds complexity to reforms but also offers an opportunity to build more coherent and lasting system-wide change from it during the processes of learning with and from each other. The results also provide us with a practical view on why coherent, lasting change cannot be authoritatively forced in a system, such as the education system, but is by its nature networked, collaborative and shared.