According to the new, more concrete curriculum goals for humans and nature, pupils will need to learn about specific cell organelles, among other things. Illustration: ImageSelect
The curriculum goals for humans and nature in primary and secondary education are outdated and abstract. A new set of updated draft curriculum goals aims to change that.
What basic knowledge about humans and nature should a pupil take with them from the final year of primary school into the first year of secondary school? And what must pupils know and be able to do to progress smoothly into further education? It is all set out in the curriculum goals – the statutory frameworks for the core content of education in primary (special) and lower secondary (special) schools. But the current curriculum goals, dating from 2006, are abstract and outdated. SLO, the national expertise centre for curriculum development, has therefore updated them on behalf of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, and delivered them last November as draft curriculum goals to the State Secretary. What can pupils and biology teachers expect when the new curriculum goals for humans and nature come into force?
Anyone who glances at the current curriculum goals for lower secondary education will indeed conclude that they are rather broad. Take curriculum goal 31, for example: ‘The pupil learns, partly through practical work, to acquire knowledge of and insight into processes in living and non-living nature and their relationship with the environment.’ Full stop. Schools then decide for themselves how to give further shape to this, which results in a diversity of subjects, projects and methods.
‘That really needed to be made a great deal more concrete, because the abstract wording gives teachers almost nothing to go on’, says Thijs Goedegebure, a curriculum developer at SLO who contributed to the update of the curriculum goals for humans and nature. ‘On top of that, it means teachers have no clear picture of what specific knowledge a first-year secondary pupil should have, and that knowledge often varies considerably between pupils. This poor alignment between primary and secondary education means a teacher cannot go straight into the subject in depth and must first revisit material to bring everyone up to the same level.’ The curriculum goals for primary and secondary education are therefore now placed side by side on the same page, so that prior knowledge and new content to be learned can be seen at a glance for each domain.
Objective sentence
All the new curriculum goals follow the same structure: they begin with a relatively abstract objective, which is then made progressively more concrete in three steps. The domain Humans and Living Systems (for secondary education) opens with the objective sentence: ‘The pupil demonstrates insight into the structure, functioning and use of bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, and explores the diversity of organisms.’ This is followed by a more concrete list under the heading ‘This includes’. There it states, for example, that pupils must be able to describe the structure and basic function of cells and cell organelles. Finally, specific examples are given – in this case specific cell organelles: cell nucleus, cell membrane, cell wall, cytoplasm, chloroplast, vacuole and mitochondrion.
To update the curriculum goals, SLO has also added societal issues that connect with children’s lived experience. ‘We believe that in 2025 you cannot have studied humans and nature without having worked on topics such as sustainability, nature management, and healthy living and eating – so we really wanted to enshrine that in law’, says Goedegebure. ‘We also believe that all pupils should have the opportunity to go outside.’ The draft curriculum goals therefore explicitly include experiencing the living environment through, for example, ‘excursions to meaningful locations for themes about humans and nature, such as a park, woodland, museum, heritage site or business where pupils experience the environment and discover how humans and nature influence one another.’ Goedegebure: ‘That also creates equal opportunities for children from different socio-economic backgrounds, because otherwise some children rarely venture beyond their own neighbourhood.’
‘This set of draft goals has broad support from a wide range of people and organisations’
Vague
‘I am enormously pleased and proud of the draft curriculum goals that have now been produced’, says Senaida Bron-Sambo, a teacher of BiNaSk (biology, physics and chemistry) in the lower years of vmbo at CSG Comenius, Zamenhof campus, in Leeuwarden. ‘I never actually use the current curriculum goals – they are simply too vague and say nothing of substance. That is frustrating, because as a teacher you have absolutely nothing to fall back on when you want to deviate from the method used in school.’
Bron-Sambo therefore decided to contribute to the development of the draft curriculum goals for humans and nature. ‘It was an intensive year, during which I focused primarily on safeguarding the interests of vmbo pupils – a frequently overlooked group. A healthy lifestyle was therefore an important theme for me: it is essential that pupils learn to make healthy choices and to reflect on their own behaviour.’
Although teachers and school leaders will begin trialling the draft curriculum goals over the coming months, there is also a political mandate to scrutinise the number of curriculum goals carefully. Feedback from schools and the additional mandate will be processed simultaneously, meaning the curriculum goals are scheduled for delivery by the end of 2025. ‘That is of course quite nerve-wracking’, says Bron-Sambo, ‘but this set of draft goals has broad support from the various people and organisations that sat on the advisory panels. Representatives of subject associations – such as the Netherlands Institute for Biology – teacher training institutions, and all manner of civil society organisations: virtually everyone is enthusiastic. The wider constituency assumes these curriculum goals will go ahead. I, for one, have every confidence in them!’
Interested in taking part in the trialling phase? Find out more at: tinyurl.com/ysdh544w