Objective: This paper explores the expectations of teachers to contribute to fostering students' wellbeing in the revised Norwegian curriculum. A new construct in the curriculum is three interdisciplinary topics -- health and life skills; democracy and citizenship; and, sustainable development -- included to give priority to prevailing societal…

Since the passing of No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB), teacher autonomy over curricular decisions has been restricted. As a result, state and local school districts faced increased pressures to adopt highly prescriptive and standardized literacy curricular programmes. Given this context, literacy curriculum adoption has become a widely…

Curriculum decisions are increasingly seen as technocratic or bureaucratic problems, rather than democratic issues that must be deliberated over. As such, curriculum decisions are placed in the hands of a small minority of bureaucrats and business elites who assume the only purpose of education is to prepare children for college and/or the labour…

This paper explores the challenges for teachers in positioning them as independent curriculum makers. History teachers in New Zealand have recently entered uncharted territory with the abandonment of prescribed topics for history and a new-found authority to determine the selection of historical knowledge taught to their senior secondary students.…

The purpose of this paper is to comparatively investigate the professional autonomy of upper secondary school teachers in three European countries in interpreting and implementing curricula. The paper focuses on teachers' experiences, and their perceptions of their autonomy and the control exercised over them in the global era of neoliberal…

Curriculum materials and knowledge about curricular purposes and structures are valuable tools that teachers often draw upon to organize instruction and facilitate student learning. Careful analysis of teachers' curriculum implementation and the decision-making that undergirds their curriculum use is critical for fully understanding enactment.…

Shows how a matrix, developed for identifying various strategies of curriculum development, can provide a basis for making a policy analysis of alternative strategies. (RM)

Case studies of school-based curriculum development (SBCD) were analyzed. The process of SBCD, including planning, implementation, evaluation, and teacher professionalism, is discussed. So that future researchers can use the historian's method on a good range of cases dealing with SBCE, a national case study archive is needed. (RM)

Proposes seven principles of program evaluation to serve as guidelines for designing evaluation procedures in Australian schools. The object of evaluation is to generate useful information about the educational environment which can be used for decision making in the curriculum development process. (AM)

Changes in instructional staff prompted development for different methods of conducting a three year course for college students. The author conducted a research survey during the change and determined that decision making in areas of business are dissimilar to those in education, the latter being rarely final, taking a great deal of time, provoke…

Explores curriculum developers' differing opinions before they design a specific curriculum; the amount of convergence of opinion caused by curriculum deliberations; and the retention of that convergence. Finds that, despite frequent discrepancies of opinion before curriculum conferences on design issues, subsequent deliberations produced a high…

The arts of perception, i.e., the arts that enable curriculum workers to see and make use of the significant and particular features of problematic situations, are discussed. The ability to discriminate and give meaning to details has received scant attention in the literature on practical curriculum problem solving. (RM)

Discusses a study tour sponsored by Stanford University (California) for which teachers were trained in curriculum development. Questions whether encouraging teachers to become curriculum developers represents empowerment or a distraction from teaching. Argues that teaching is unlike curriculum development. Presents challenges that teachers…

A seminar held on a kibbutz in Israel in which educators from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel discussed school-based curriculum development is described. (RM)

Proposes curriculum negotiation as necessary to the professional autonomy of the educator who works with adults. Suggests that the educator of adults, through this negotiation, will be better able to understand the social processes that drive educational transactions, while sustaining educational ethics within these processes. (KO)