Curriculum or ‘leerplan’ What is a curriculum?

10 The ‘higher’ curriculum levels will affect the ‘lower’ ones, especially if they have a mandatory status that limits the room to manoeuvre for large target groups. A clear example is the influence of examination programmes and core objectives on textbooks. Authors take these macro frameworks carefully into account. Teachers, in turn, place such great confidence in this that they will hardly consult the original policy documents. The relationships from macro via meso to micro are looser. Certainly in the Netherlands, with its tradition of freedom of educational organization, the government tends to exercise restraint in stipulating content, and allows schools, teachers and pupils a relatively large amount of curricular freedom. It is also helpful to realize that curriculum products, including those at micro level, may vary strongly in their scope and scale, ranging from generic, e.g. publishers’ methods, to very site-specific, such as a teaching plan designed by a teacher for use in his own practice. In case of large-scale curriculum innovations with generic intentions, many distribution and implementation problems often occur. The challenge for professional curriculum developers who operate on different levels is to anticipate these, not only concerning the product characteristics, but also, in collaboration with the many parties involved, regarding the change strategy.

1.1.3 Curriculum representations

A second, clarifying distinction concerns the different forms in which curricula can be represented. Although further refinement is possible, the following three levels, split up into six forms, will normally suffice for clear communication. INTENDED Ideal Vision rationale or basic philosophy underlying a curriculum FormalWritten Intentions as specified in curriculum documents andor materials IMPLEMENTED Perceived Curriculum as interpreted by its users especially teachers Operational Actual process of teaching and learning also: curriculum-in-action ATTAINED Experiential Learning experiences as perceived by learners Learned Resulting learning outcomes of learners Table 2: Forms of curriculum The division into six representations, built on the work by John Goodlad 1979; see also van den Akker, 2003, is especially useful in the analysis of the processes and the outcomes of curriculum innovations. The more global three-way division is often used in international comparative studies that frequently focus on large-scale assessment of attainment levels