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Abstract
Teachers’ curriculum ownership is increasingly gaining attention in many countries. It is particularly important that under the conditions of centralized curriculum-making, teachers as final implementers of curricular ideas identify themselves with these ideas. This study investigates Estonian upper secondary school teachers’ views on the impact that teacher engagement in state-based curriculum-making has had on their feelings of curriculum ownership. Like elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the curriculum policy in Estonia after the fall of communism has attempted to combine state-based curriculum-making with measures to enhance teachers’ curriculum ownership. The study compares the views of two teacher groups—those who participated in state-level curriculum development and those who did not—regarding the curriculum-making process and curriculum documents. Data were gathered by interviewing 34 teachers. As for the theoretical framework, we used Hopmann’s concept of the three basic features of the social process in centralized curriculum-making: compartmentalization, licensing and segmentation. The study revealed that the proclaimed aim of educational policy of enhancing teachers’ curriculum ownership—essentially an attempt at de-segmentation and licensing—has not been achieved due to the opposing tendencies of compartmentalization and segmentation, which are not enunciated but inherent in the curriculum-making process and curriculum documents.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Professor Ian Westbury from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and associate professor Kirsten Sivesind from the University of Oslo, for their thorough and insightful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
Notes
1. We make three conceptual clarifications. Firstly, whereas in some countries (e.g. Germany and the US) state and national refer to different levels, these terms are synonymous in Estonian curriculum policy. There is no intermediate curriculum decision-making body between the state (national) level and school level. Secondly, relying on Hopmann (Citation1990b, p. 161), curriculum-making encompasses both the curriculum development process (i.e. the social process of constructing a written curriculum) and curriculum implementation. Thirdly, state-based encompasses both the state level and school level, inasmuch as curriculum-making at both these levels is regulated centrally at the state level.
2. Distinguishing between the terms ‘(de)centralization’ and ‘(de)regulation’, De Groof, Neave, and Švec (Citation1998, p. 40) define deregulation as the maximum reduction of regulations in order to maximize the personal choice of institutions and individuals, whereas decentralization seeks to assign more responsibility to regional and local authorities, with the central government maintaining the role of determining general strategic choices. Thus, decentralization does not imply deregulation (De Groof et al., Citation1998, p. 40). As our empirical context allows us to talk about (de)centralization rather than about (de)regulation, we stay with that term, acknowledging that not every author necessarily distinguishes between the two terms, or may distinguish between them in a different way.
3. The letter and number combinations following each quotation refer to each participant’s relation to the development of NC or SC, order of the interview, and the respective subject (E: Estonian language and literature; Eng: English; H: history and social studies; M: music; Ma: mathematics; P: physical education; S: science).