Designing for teacher education: Exploring the concept of a responsive curriculum

Curriculum designers in teacher education are challenged to design curricula that react to, and anticipate, complexity and change and make a curriculum more adaptive, flexible or responsive. The aim of the current study is to enhance understanding of the responsiveness of teacher education curricula. A curriculum is a plan for learning and it organizes, sequences and stimulates learning experiences in school and in practice (Billett, 2011). We consider a curriculum as responsive when it takes individual differences and needs of learners into account, is adaptive to a variety of contexts in occupational practice and anticipates change in society (Author, 1995; Turkenburg & Vogels, 2017). A curriculum includes different levels (micro, meso), design dimensions (epistemic, social, instrumental, temporal and spatial) and actors (students and their supervisors) (Author, 2019; Van den Akker, 2013). In this participative design research a variety of design initiatives in five bachelor science teacher education programs (ISCED 6) are included. Data sources were documents, participatory observations of organized design sessions, project meetings, and just-in-time interviews. A logbook was used to keep track of the initiatives and to reflect on design activities including creative leaps. The data was analyzed qualitatively using templates. The results are expected before the Jure conference in August 2021.