The management of curriculum change in Greece

Kelly, Anthony and Karempelas, Konstantinos (2004) The management of curriculum change in Greece. International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement, Rotterdam, Holland. 05 - 08 Jan 2004.

Abstract

In Greece, the management of change in primary science education is perceived as a challenge for school leaders, and policy-makers are concerned that recent initiatives have failed. The research literature on the meaning of sustainable and systemic reform examines patterns of managing change as a means of accomplishing the objectives of learning communities, but how does this match up with the reality of implementing it? This paper reports on a project to investigate the reform of primary science in Greece, where teachers and local school leaders, though they were not involved in the processes of initiation and planning, were asked to turn it to the advantage of students. The project focuses on teachers’ reactions to change: a sample of primary school teachers, policy-makers, school consultants and university ITE tutors were interviewed. The data collected suggest that the Greek situation embodies some typical features of the subjective meaning (as well as the objective reality) of educational change as found in the literature; analysis of results describes the extent to which this was done effectively. Real change, whether desired or not, represents a personal and collective learning experience for the people involved and the most useful insights into the change process often come from close association with practice.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: Anthony Kelly

Download statistics