PhD Research: A Responsive Curriculum for Teacher Education

Economic, social, and environmental challenges are placing new demands on teachers and teacher education. Moreover, teacher education is expected to educate and qualify more teachers in response to teacher shortages. The diversity of students entering teacher education is increasing.

Consequently, curriculum designers in teacher education are challenged to design curricula that react to, and anticipate changes and make the curriculum more dynamic, flexible, or responsive. In vocational education literature, a curriculum is considered as responsive when it is adaptive to a variety of contexts in occupational practice and takes individual differences and needs of students into account. Although there is some knowledge on responsiveness in secondary vocational education this knowledge is rather limited in higher education. Therefore, the research question of this PhD research is: How can a responsive curriculum for teacher education be designed?

Because there is a lack of knowledge on how to design, develop and evaluate responsive curricula in teacher education, this study focusses on the design perspective. Subsequently, the scientific contribution is design knowledge on responsive curricula that can be used in teacher education.

Besides curriculum design knowledge in general, the outcomes of this PhD research can be used to redesign teacher education curricula. Therefore, Archimedes Institute (14 teacher education programs) and its partnership schools, participate in this research. To validate the results also other teacher education institutes are involved in the study.

01 February 2020 - 31 January 2026

"The essence of flexibility lies in equality and the process of learning together, as this enables us to move in any direction within the boundaries we have. Yet within those boundaries, we have a great deal of freedom to collaboratively explore what we want to learn."
Participant in the study

The overall PhD study follows a model of design-based research in education consisting of three design steps: 1) analysis/exploration, 2) design/construction, and 3) evaluation/reflection. The longitudinal study is carried out in a cluster of five science teacher education programs. Furthermore, interview studies are conducted.