Understanding Curriculum Reform in the Netherlands
When a curriculum reform occurred, the Netherlands like many countries across Europe, faced a big dilemma in choosing to implement curriculum regulation or curriculum deregulation.
In the study conducted by Kuiper, Nieveen, and Berkvens (2013) on curriculum reform in the Netherlands, curriculum regulation is construed as a government’s intention to completely control the situation in all educational settings from input level (goals and contents) to output level (assessments and surveillance), leaving hardly any room for school and teacher’s freedom.
On the other hand, curriculum deregulation means a government’s intention to avoid any prescriptive modes and instead promote school-based decision-making, giving complete freedom for schools and teachers to tailor the curriculum according to their needs and characteristics.
The issue above faced by the Netherlands is related to the teacher’s professional dilemmas discussed in Briant and Doherty’s (2012) article. The dilemma is whether a curriculum perceives a teacher as a professional who has proficient competencies and judgments to conduct a classroom autonomously or as a technician who should only follow the prescribed curriculum.
This first dilemma is also related to the second dilemma, that is, how teaching is perceived as to merely address the assessment requirements or promote knowledge and the spirit of learning.
The case in the Netherlands as studied by Kuiper, Nieveen, and Berkvens (2013) provides a challenging paradox in executing these two perspectives. When the Netherlands strictly prescribed the curriculum, the result was it is interpreted as undermining the teacher’s professionalism and affecting the credibility of the teacher negatively. However, when complete freedom was given to recontextualize the curriculum, it was reported that teachers lacked confidence in their curriculum design competency and struggled to utilize the curricular freedom, resulting in non-optimal learning and teaching process.
Rather than fully implementing curriculum regulation or curriculum deregulation separately, balancing both perspectives is considered as the most accommodating way.
To manifest this idea, a comprehensive curriculum framework should be formed, aiming at providing direction, specification, and exemplification to guide schools, teachers, and textbook publishers in their interpretation and choices for curriculum enactment.
The curriculum framework shall also be accompanied by supporting educational materials that can be adjusted to the local objectives of the school. The challenge of this idea lies in what extent the coverage of curriculum framework is, which will define what knowledge is most worth learning and teaching.
In the midst of massive demands from various stakeholders regarding what the worth learning subjects are (e.g., digital literacy, financial education, health education, environmental education, and so forth), sometimes an overloaded curriculum is inevitable. Therefore, a curriculum framework shall be perceived as mere helpful guidance that requires no standardized testing and a bit of supervision to allow schools and teachers to refer and recontextualize it according to their local settings.
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