Designing a curriculum: what can we learn from digital literacy in the Netherlands?

I had the pleasure of attending the ISSEP (Informatics in Schools) conference last week, together with my colleagues Bobby Whyte and Laurie Gale. It was held in Budapest, Hungary, with most of the attendees from countries in Europe, including Switzerland, Estonia, Germany, Netherlands, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, and of course Hungary. There were many takeaways for the three of us, but in this blog post I wanted to focus on a paper presented by Nataša Grgurina and Jos Tolboom. Grgurina is a curriculum developer from the Netherlands who is deeply involved in plans to update the Netherlands’ digital literacy curriculum. This is particularly pertinent for those of us based in England while we are in the process of a curriculum and assessment review.

If you don’t have time to read on, here—in short—are the questions I was left considering that I think are pertinent for the curriculum review in England or anyone reworking a curriculum in the areas of digital technologies/computing:

Does your curriculum have horizontal coherence as well as vertical coherence? In other words, are you introducing topics in maths, science, literacy and computing that complement each other and don’t require dependencies on topics in other subject domains that haven’t been taught yet?
Can we view programming as part of designing and making and not a reflection of a mathematical endeavour?
Are we ensuring that all children have the right to an understanding of artificial intelligence, starting with data literacy?
Can we integrate skills around digital media with computer science principles rather than having a debate that leads to an either/or?
Does what we call the subject really matter?

Developing a K-8 curriculum in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the curriculum is being redeveloped for Grades K-8, which in England and Wales covers Key Stages 1–3. As part of this endeavour, the government assigned the task of writing the curriculum for each subject to the Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development (in Dutch, the Stichting Leerplan Ontwikkeling (SLO)). The paper presented at ISSEP detailed the development of the Digital Literacy (DL) curriculum. The SLO put together a team of teachers, curriculum developers and education and informatics specialists to develop the curriculum.

Underpinning the curriculum development is a philosophy of education drawing on Biesta’s three aims of education. According to Gert Biesta, there are three aims of education: qualification (developing knowledge that enables them to ‘do something’), socialisation (ways in which, through education, we become members of and part of particular social, cultural and political ‘orders’) and subjectification (the opposite of socialisation, meaning a students’ development as autonomous individuals). This work is widely known internationally, and is cited by Grgurina as the philosophical basis for the curriculum in the Netherlands.

The Dutch team used a set of quality criteria in the curriculum design, including developing vertical coherence (sequencing or spiralling the content through grades K–8 so that topics build on one another) and horizontal coherence (ensuring that the curriculum aligns with other subject areas). Hearing about horizontal coherence gave me much food for thought, as I wondered how much this might be neglected when computing and digital technology are being introduced. Do we know enough about the dependencies and opportunities within our subject to teach it discretely while symbiotically linking to other areas of the curriculum?

*What characterises a particular subject area? How do we describe the relationships with other subjects?*

Back to the Netherlands. Grgurina and Tolboom described the guiding principles underpinning curriculum design for this subject as:

The learning area has specific knowledge and skills.
The learning area offers opportunities for expression and creative design.
The learning area has a reflective component.
The relation between people and digital technology is reciprocal.
Digital literacy is intertwined with other learning areas.

In total, 70% of the curriculum time in Grades K–8 in the Netherlands is focused on subjects, and 7% of that time is available for digital literacy. The content is divided into three domains: practical knowledge and skills, designing and making, and the interaction between digital technology, digital media, the people and society. The actual topics to be taught can be seen in the figure below:

*Three domains of digital literacy and nine associated topics from the planned K–8 curriculum for the Netherlands*.

Given that this is a new, proposed curriculum (the Netherlands has an existing Informatics curriculum for the secondary levels), it is interesting to see Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data taking their place amongst other more expected topics. Under domain 1,

Practical Knowledge and Skills, children aged 6–14 learn the following aspects of Data and AI:

4. Data: The student explores the use of data and data processing. This concerns:

describing how information is created by collecting, structuring and processing data in a purposeful manner;
explaining how the results of data processing depend on the origin, accuracy and completeness of the dataset used;
using a dataset to answer a question;
describing the use of data in your own environment;
reflecting on the fact that the user of digital technology consciously and unconsciously leaves data behind and that these can be used by others.

5. Artificial Intelligence: The student explores how AI systems work. This concerns:

describing elements of an AI system and how the behaviour of AI systems resembles human behaviour;
recognizing common AI systems and their applications in your own environment;
interacting purposefully, responsibly and critically with an AI system.

Here we also see that although the focus is on technical knowledge, this is interwoven with societal issues, demonstrating the interaction of society, technology and the individual. All too often technical and societal aspects may be presented as different domains of knowledge, while learning about computer science principles is separated out from issues relating to the human and society. In my own research career, I’ve long been convinced by the work of Carsten Schulte from the University of Paderborn on the socio-technical approach to computing, and the way in which society influences technological advancement. In a discussion about paradigms for understanding the nature of computing and computing education, Schulte and Budde write:

“… the interaction between humans and artefacts is often at the centre of attention. There is an increasing focus on the different levels of interaction, the understanding of roles and the mutual effects. Unfortunately the digital world of automation, algorithms and virtualization is often understood in public debate as the other, in contrast to the real analogue world.” (Schulte and Budde, 2018, p.6). (the emphasis is mine, and here’s the paper)

Returning to the Netherland’s curriculum plans, in Domain 2, the domain of Designing and Making, we see a coherent mix of developing digital products with programming, in a creative way.

6. Creating with Digital Technology. The student uses appropriate strategies when creating and using different types of digital products. This concerns:

experimenting with digital means to express thoughts, ideas or feelings;
sharing information and conveying a message;
using computational thinking strategies when designing a digital product;
designing a digital product based on the design requirements in an iterative process;
taking copyrights, licences and source and name attribution into account when creating digital products.

7. Programming. The student programs a computer program using computational thinking strategies. This concerns:

experimenting with code;
describing the task and purpose of a computer program;
designing and schematically representing the algorithm associated with a task;
using programming concepts: input and output, variables, operators, repetition and control structures;
testing and adjusting your own computer program or a computer program from others.

I found it quite refreshing to see programming explicitly included within Design and Making, and that it included a consideration of testing and others’ requirements. Schulte has more to say here about the role of programming in the primary and secondary computing curriculum if you’d like to read more about this topic.

Terminology

It is worth noting that the ‘Digital Literacy’ curriculum being designed for the Netherlands includes AI and programming, which highlights the fact that the term is being used much more broadly than some people in England may have been encouraged to interpret it. Similarly, the term Informatics, used in many European countries, corresponds to computing/computer science, and can be interpreted differently depending on the curriculum. I know of no other country that makes a distinction between computing and computer science in the way that England does, which makes some of the discussion around terminology in England very difficult to relate to internationally. This debate has become so hard-wired into our thinking that I believe it’s creating a fixed mindset and causing division where there doesn’t need to be any. Even without looking too far from England, Wales has called its equivalent subject Digital Competence, and Northern Ireland offers a GCSE in Digital Technology.

In summary

Of course, no curriculum description will please everyone, but these plans certainly give us food for thought. My personal critique, from a sociotechnical perspective, would be that even in the Dutch plans more could still be done to integrate knowledge and skills with their societal implications. At least this small case study shows us the direction in which a curriculum could go. In England, we have a programme of study for Computing that was announced in 2013 and implemented in 2014, so I’m excited to see what much-needed changes might emerge when Professor Francis and her team announce the results of the curriculum and assessment review next year. For me, I’m hoping for attention to horizontal coherence, particularly around data, for a recognition that society drives technological development rather than the other way around, and for an awareness that all young people now need a degree of AI literacy/education.

Nataša’s presentation can be found here. If you’re interested in other countries in Europe, the Informatics Education in School report details how computing is taught in 37 European countries.

Developing a K-8 curriculum in the Netherlands

Terminology

In summary

Further reading