Designing for empowering curriculum implementation

The potential of “enduring competencies”

Abstract

International advocacy for future-focused curriculum design often centres on the idea of “competencies” or “capabilities” as potentially transformative constructs for high-level curriculum frameworks. This trend is exemplified by the addition of “key competencies” to the 2007 New Zealand Curriculum. Despite good intentions, this structural change appears to have made minimal difference to the learning that many students experience, or to the assessment practices used to evaluate that learning. With a Curriculum Refresh currently underway, now is an opportune moment to revisit the use of competencies as a lever for curriculum change and ask how the type of transformative change they are intended to stimulate might be conveyed and implemented in more empowering ways.

This paper introduces the idea of “enduring competencies” as an umbrella construct for more effective curriculum design conversations. Learning from what has proved problematic in the past, we show how this construct might refocus thinking about purposes for learning, while at the same time being more specific about how and why traditional curriculum “content” might need to change. We illustrate this potential by drawing on our recent collective endeavour to build a small set of enduring competencies for school science education. The paper briefly outlines these four enduring competencies and demonstrates how they build bridges between past (more traditional) and future-focused (more transformative) curriculum and assessment design for the science learning area.