Dissertation
Teaching, curriculum and purposes of education: connecting theory and practice
This dissertation focuses on questions about the purposes of education and what it means to be educated. These questions are relevant across time, as the answers to these questions are always to some extent related to contemporary society.
- Author
- Kevin Zweeris
- Date
- 15 October 2025
- Links
- Fulltext in Leiden University Scholarly Publications
Schools and teachers were increasingly expected to contribute to student development beyond the acquisition of knowledge and skills for tests in recent years. Consequently, they may have to reconsider their curriculum and teaching activities. Such processes should always be guided by a conceptual framework about purposes of education. Four studies were conducted to develop and explore instruments that might guide teachers’ reflections on their teaching practice and provide them an overview of the possibilities regarding purposes of education. A conceptual framework was developed by combining curriculum orientations and goal domains, which offers both an overview of general purposes of education and specific goals for teaching practices and curriculum development at the class, school and government level.
This dissertation shows that the tools that were developed support teacher reflections on and rich diversity of their purposes of education. Moreover, the conceptual framework also offers a conceptualization of an overarching goal from educational philosophy and pedagogy, namely responsible self- and codetermination.