Hans de Vries works as a curriculum developer at SLO, the Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development. His focus areas are digital literacy, digital learning resources, assessment, curriculum and ICT, and research. As an advisor in the latest curriculum reform, he was involved with the Teacher Design Team for digital literacy. This team worked on the building blocks for digital literacy, a new learning area in Dutch national curriculum as part of a new national curriculum for nine learning areas. Hans is a former teacher, school principal and educational advisor.
Hans de Vries works as a curriculum developer at SLO, the Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development. His focus areas are digital literacy, digital learning resources, assessment, curriculum and ICT, and research. As an advisor in the latest curriculum reform, he was involved with the Teacher Design Team for digital literacy. This team worked on the building blocks for digital literacy, a new learning area in Dutch national curriculum as part of a new national curriculum for nine learning areas. Hans is a former teacher, school principal and educational advisor.
Digital Literacy will be included in the revision of the Dutch curriculum for primary and secondary education. This is necessary because there is little or no attention given to Digital Literacy in the current curriculum, while the need to include it in the curriculum is evident.
In recent years, more and more schools are educating their students in Digital Literacy, although they shouldn’t have to, because Digital Literacy does not have national core objectives or attainment targets. Research shows that much remains to be done to address all aspects of Digital Literacy in continuous learning tracks and careful monitoring of student progress. The teacher design team (TDT), which has made proposals for the new national curriculum with regard to Digital literacy, emphasizes the importance of conceptual knowledge, of critical thinking about the role of digital technology for people and society and of the use of digital technology for creative processes.
The proposals of the TDT described almost all competencies from the Digcomp 2.1 framework and added some elements to it.
The political decision-making process about the continuation of the revision of the Dutch curriculum has not yet been completed. When it comes to the introduction of Digital Literacy, it is important to learn from the experiences with Information Science in the 1990s. This means that a lot of attention will have to be paid to the implementation of the curriculum of Digital Literacy and to the training of teachers. It is also important that Digital Literacy is properly embedded in the curriculum, especially if the choice is made to integrate it into other subjects as much as possible.
FIGURE 8 OVERVIEW OF THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IN THE NETHERLANDS
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