Participation in national curriculum reform - coherence from complexity

National curriculum reform is a complex negotiation point of how basic
education should be practiced and what role it should take in society. The
question of participation in this process is central to creating a coherent,
responsible, and implementable curriculum—but still left for little investigation in the national level reforms. Our goal was to answer, how can
participation in curriculum reform create coherent system-wide change in
a complex education system? In this study, we approach the participative
national Finnish Core Curriculum Reform 2014, through interviews of the
reform steering group who acted as central stakeholders in the reform. We
practiced a thinking with theory -oriented analysis and utilized Michel
Callon’s four moments of translation as a theoretical framework to examine the interviews.
Results illustrate how the moment of interessement leads to enrolment
—how participation adds complexity to reforms but also offers an opportunity to build more coherent and lasting system-wide change from it
during the processes of learning with and from each other. The results
also provide us with a practical view on why coherent, lasting change
cannot be authoritatively forced in a system, such as the education
system, but is by its nature networked, collaborative and shared.