Enhancing teachers’ curriculum ownership via teacher engagement in state-based curriculum-making: the Estonian case

Teachers’ curriculum ownership is increasingly gaining attention in many countries. It is particularly important that under the conditions of centralized curriculum-making, teachers as final implementers of curricular ideas identify themselves with these ideas. This study investigates Estonian upper secondary school teachers’ views on the impact that teacher engagement in state-based curriculum-making has had on their feelings of curriculum ownership. Like elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the curriculum policy in Estonia after the fall of communism has attempted to combine state-based curriculum-making with measures to enhance teachers’ curriculum ownership. The study compares the views of two teacher groups—those who participated in state-level curriculum development and those who did not—regarding the curriculum-making process and curriculum documents. Data were gathered by interviewing 34 teachers. As for the theoretical framework, we used Hopmann’s concept of the three basic features of the social process in centralized curriculum-making: compartmentalization, licensing and segmentation. The study revealed that the proclaimed aim of educational policy of enhancing teachers’ curriculum ownership—essentially an attempt at de-segmentation and licensing—has not been achieved due to the opposing tendencies of compartmentalization and segmentation, which are not enunciated but inherent in the curriculum-making process and curriculum documents.