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This chapter addresses the balancing act between curriculum guidance and curriculum space, against the backdrop of an integral curriculum review at the national/macro level in the Netherlands, labelled ‘Curriculum.nu’. As part of this review initiative, many choices have to be made, reflecting answers to the following two questions: What balance is needed between curriculum regulation at the macro level and the provision of curricular space for schools at the meso and the micro level? And, what are the related responsibilities of all involved in the educational system web in order to make the curriculum change successful? Before getting to tentative answers, the chapter will provide an introduction to curriculum policy in the Netherlands and will offer an overview of the motives, aims, approaches and preliminary results of Curriculum.nu. The provisional answers include a set of research-informed principles for making the curriculum review efforts a success, including a call for dovetailing the various curriculum layers and for a strategic curriculum mix of room for school-specific decision-making, substantive guidance, support by exemplification and firm investments in professional development.

Shared understandings of curriculum reform within and between the levels of the educational system are suggested to be crucial for the reform to take root. The purpose of this paper is to explore variation in perceived curriculum coherence and school impact among state- and district-level stakeholders.

The participants (n=666) included state- and district-level stakeholders involved in a national curriculum reform in Finland. Latent profile analysis was employed to identify profiles based on participants’ perceptions of the core curriculum’s coherence and the reform’s impact on school development.

Two profiles were identified: high coherence and impact, and lower consistency of the intended direction and impact. State-level stakeholders had higher odds of belonging to the high coherence and impact profile than their district-level counterparts.

The results imply that more attention needs to be paid in developing a shared and coherent understanding particularly of the intended direction of the core curriculum as well as the reform’s effects on school-level development among state- and district-level stakeholders.

The study contributes to the literature on curriculum reform by shedding light on the variation in perceived curriculum coherence and school impact of those responsible for a large-scale national curriculum reform process at different levels of the educational system.

This chapter provides an introduction to the European case study chapters in this volume on curriculum making. The chapter explores different conceptions of curriculum and curriculum making. It offers a critique of existing thinking about curriculum making as something that occurs withinreified levels within an educational system. Such thinking often construes curriculum making as occurring through linear and hierarchical chains of command from policy to practice. Drawing upon previous conceptualizations of curriculum making, the chapter develops a new approach to understanding curriculum making. This is a heuristic rather than a normative framing; it is essentially non-linear, framed around the concept of intertwined sites of activity – supra, macro, meso, micro and nano – within complex systems, with curriculum making framed as types of activity rather than institutional functions.

The Czech case sheds light on the processes of curriculum making inthe post-socialist context. To explain the relationship between the macro and micro levels of curriculum development, Graeber's concept of interpretive labour is used. In the Czech Republic, from the very first days of the Velvet Revolution (November 1989), groups of citizens and teachers demanded profound change in school education but the new conservative-liberal government preferred piecemeal steps.An alternative route to radical school reform was proposed at the meso level by an alliance of health psychologists and progressive teachers, using the know-how of the World Health Organization. Schools that voluntarily joined the Healthy Schoolnetwork were expected to restructuretheir core processes by an approach similar to school-based curriculum development. This change model was adopted at the macro level,when the Social Democrats formed a government in 1998. The new Education Act mandated that each school had to develop its own curriculum using the new national framework. The analysis of policy documents paving the way for this reform, however, showsa sequence of unfulfilled plans and promises. Almost all independent evaluations have found that the essential goals of the reform have remained unfulfilled, as schools mostly created their curriculaby, for example, formally recycling the old national syllabi.As curriculum making occurs across different levels, the failed curricular reform resulted in a blame game among thelevels(the ministry, curricular agency, inspectorate, school leaders, teachers and others),with no actor accepting theirshare of the responsibilityand probably considering any lessons for future curriculum revisions.

Lesson study (LS) is generally regarded as a pathway for teachers' professional development and a method for teachers' instructional research. LS has been regarded as having the potential to drive large-scale reform but little is known about how it does so from a district level. Therefore, this paper aims to reveal how lesson study promote district education reform.

This study offers an in-depth case study of how District Y of Shanghai, China, took LS as the primary method in promoting its District Project of Building Curriculum Leadership in Schools. By analyzing the key project documents and achievements in project promotion, and interviews with the major Project leaders at District and school levels, this study explored the practice and impact of LS as a tool to promote district reform.

In the District Project, LS has been a medium to address each individual school's real problems of practice and turn them into reform vision and reform will in alignment with District goals. Five levels of school curriculum texts have been planned, designed, translated, implemented, reflected on, updated and mutually adjusted systematically through LS to ensure consistency in transforming District reform vision into classroom practice. Different models of teaching-research community building were found in sampled project schools and professional expertise was built with district support to promote reform. The curriculum leadership development through LS has shaped reform leader schools and formed a collection of LS exemplars circulated in schools as high-quality curriculum packages, which laid the foundation for district-wide reform.

The innovative practice of LS in China's education reform has expanded its reach from within one classroom to the entire district curriculum system and made it an important tool to drive large-school district-based education reform.

The prospect of state funding for foundation programmes has heralded a new interest in such programmes in the Higher Education sector. Already the proposed funding frameworks appear to be influencing the nature of foundation curricula. Against this background Peninsula Technikon is currently implementing pilot foundation programmes in Mechanical and Civil Engineering. This pilot draws on an integrated, extended curriculum model emerging in the Engineering faculty, which uses a focus subject from the mainstream programme around which to build the foundation curriculum. This paper presents a multi‐level analysis of policy articulation regarding foundation programmes, from a mode 2 (Gibbons 1994) perspective which emphasises the need for learning to be applied in real‐life, problem‐solving contexts which transcend disciplinary boundaries and reflect issues of importance to society. It examines this policy and responses to it, at the macro level of state and the Higher Education (HE) sector, as well as the micro level of an individual HE institution and two academic departments. Finally suggestions are made as to why and how articulation from the micro to the macro level could enhance policy implementation.

Teacher education programmes are critical in developing pre-service teachers’ competencies during the apprenticeship phase (Lim et al., 2010), whereas there is evidence indicating that teacher education programmes depend on curriculum leadership (Robinson et al., 2008). The purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which curriculum leaders enact their curriculum leadership to enhance teacher education programmes in a context of a normal university in Mainland China.

In this paper, three groups of curriculum leaders, from university, faculty and classroom level, respectively, are interviewed.

This study highlights the significance of curriculum leadership in teacher education programmes enhancement in China, particularly the significant impacts from curriculum leaders’ involvement on the programme processes of planning, implementation and evaluation.

Implications for research include a conceptualization of curriculum leadership in teacher education and pre-service teachers’ training in China, and a theoretical integration of curriculum leadership and the enhancement of teacher education programmes.

Implications for practice regard to restructuring curriculum leadership system and informing curriculum leadership practices, not only in Asian countries, but might be able to shed light on the curriculum leadership development in a range of educational contexts either similar to or different from that of Mainland China. This study thus would contribute to several areas of research.

This paper seeks to discuss the rationale of the newly reformed health education curriculum in Cyprus, which aspires to enable not only teachers, but also all the school personnel, to work from the perspective of health promotion. It is a curriculum which moves from the traditional approach of health education focusing on individual lifestyle/behaviour modification into approaches that recognise and tackle the determinants of health.

The paper critically discusses the structure and the content of the learning objectives of this curriculum that encourages teachers to work in a health promoting way.

The central goal of this curriculum is to enable students and schools to act as health agents, addressing the structural determinants of health and promoting environmental changes. The optimum level for all topics of the curriculum is achieved through learning objectives, which concern three interconnected levels. These are: “investigating determinants of health”, “practising action competency skills for health” and “achieving changes in favour of health”. All levels are means as well as end products in terms of the curriculum objectives.

The outcome of the development of the health education curriculum acts as a guide for school interventions, through a methodological framework, which encourages participants to identify and promote environmental changes that facilitate healthy choices. This is of significance to those working in the field of health promotion and who seek to establish a new language of health promotion that goes beyond the pervasive discourse of individual lifestyles.

The implementation of the particular health education curriculum will promote not only health in the school community but also in the local community. This is because a key principle which underlies the curriculum is the involvement of the students, school staff, family and community in everyday health promotion practice. It also promotes the development of partnerships among them.

This is an innovative curriculum for Cyprus, based on health promotion and health education principles, but at the same time taking in account the local socio‐cultural and political perspective. This curriculum may be applicable to other European countries.

This paper aims to analyze the presence of sustainability in 16 Spanish higher education curricula in the fields of education and engineering.

The methodology uses two instruments: sustainability map and sustainability presence map. These instruments enable analysis of the number of subjects that develop sustainability and the sustainability presence level in each curriculum; identification of what domain levels of the learning taxonomy sustainability is most developed; and analysis of whether a correlation exists between the sustainability presence and the number of subjects that develop sustainability in each curriculum.

A wide variety of subjects develop sustainability in a given degree, depending on the university. The presence of sustainability is more homogeneous in education degrees than in engineering degrees. Education degrees have a greater presence of sustainability in the lower domain levels of taxonomy, while in engineering degrees the lower levels of taxonomy have a lower presence of sustainability than the higher levels. Finally, a correlation appears to exist between the number of subjects that develop sustainability in the curriculum and the sustainability presence. However, engineering degrees seem to need fewer subjects than education degrees to achieve the same degree of sustainability presence.

This paper proposes a methodology to measure sustainability presence that can be applicable to the curricula of a higher education degree if the corresponding sustainability map is available. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the largest study yet conducted to analyze the presence of sustainability in different higher education curricula.