Co-Created Curricula: Practicing and Practicing Democratic Citizenship

• In Event: The Challenges and Possibilities of Including Students in School Leadership

Abstract

If we expect students to contribute to school change process including making decisions about what is relevant to learn, we must provide our students with opportunities to develop democratic qualities. This paper presents theory and empirical data from four case studies in The Netherlands and Flanders where students and teacher co-created their class curriculum. The theoretical part relates this approach to Boomer's (1992) curriculum negotiation and Beane's (1997) integrated curricula. The results of a theoretical and empirical analyses are presented. We explored which skills from the domains of citizenship education (Authors, 2012) and 21st century skills (Binkley et al, 2010) are actually practised by students, based on interviews with teachers and student questionnaires. The results show that including students in curriculum co-creation contributes to the development of democratic qualities. From our experiences, pitfalls and recommendations for involving students in decision making on their curriculum are presented.

Author

• Jeroen Gerard Bron, SLO - The Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development