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UT-Hybrid-D, school-based curriculum development, curriculum policy, citizenship education, Secondary school teachers, and teachers' curriculum-making

Due to socio‐political issues in Dutch society, citizenship education (CE) became obligatory by law in the Netherlands in 2006. Schools were to decide on their local CE curriculum. This contribution intends to open up the black box of school‐based curriculum‐making efforts for CE. It reports on a four‐year study in four schools for secondary education. In each school, teachers designed (parts of) their CE curriculum with guidance during weekly coaching sessions. The central question is, what are the professional experiences and results of teachers who are involved in guided school‐based CE curriculum‐making? The qualitative data set comprised of interview and focus group data as well as artefacts such as CE‐activities designed by teachers. Findings show teachers' preference for broad and integrated approaches to CE, and that teachers needed guidance not only to improve their CE‐knowledge and design abilities, but also to increase their socio‐political skills for school‐wide implementation. These results are discussed in view of the current tendency in the Netherlands to define CE in a more centralised and content‐specific manner and in doing so limiting the space for teachers as curriculum‐makers.

ComputingMilieux_COMPUTERSANDEDUCATION

Ethics education is part of many engineering curricula and at the same time a debated matter in terms of its goals, extent and educational approach. The quality of ethics education is, however, not prominently described in engineering education research (EER). To answer this gap, we perform a literature review that focuses on ethics education in EER. We analysed the data using a general quality framework that considers four elements of quality, i.e. relevance, consistency, practicality and effectiveness. We find that EER elaborates on the relevance of ethics education in three different ways: realisation of conceptual goals as honesty, integrity, or social responsibility; support of engineering concepts as complexity or risk; or instrumentally to comply with national educational standards. EER has little focus on consistency, except for the link with the entire curriculum. Also practicality is little developed, only on whether assessment is valid and reliable in ethics education. Teachers' perceptions of the instrumentality (is it helpful in teaching), congruence (does it fit the circumstances) and cost (is it feasible with the available time and resources) are less stressed. Debates on effectiveness in turn are prominent in ethics education and focus on the influence of: student characteristics and competences; course design; connection with the curriculum; and broader cultural aspects. We conclude that consistency and practicality are largely missing in ethics education in EER and that many implicit notions of relevance and effectiveness exist. This framework can make quality more explicit and impact the discussions on ethics education in EER.

ComputingMilieux_COMPUTERSANDEDUCATION

This chapter reports and reflects upon an early study on the potential of teacher design teams as a means for school-wide curriculum development. To do so, the chapter provides the rationale behind teacher design teams together with experiences and findings from a school site where such teacher design teams were active in the redesign of their local curriculum. Here, teacher collaboration was seen as essential to bridge the gap between the work of individual teachers (within their own subjects and classrooms) and school-wide curriculum renewal aspirations. The chapter ends with discussion of several conclusions and recommendations for schools and teachers that aim to pursue such a teacher design team scenario.