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BARRON TIRADO, Maria Concepción, DIAZ BARRIGA, Frida (2016). Curriculum Management and 
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Curriculum Management and the Role of 

Curriculum Actors1 

 
María Concepción Barrón Tirado2, Frida Díaz Barriga3,  

National Autonomous University of México, México 
 

Introduction 
Curriculum management4 can only be approached within the framework of the 

educational management of the institution as a whole. Its study demands a series of 

theoretical and methodological frameworks that recount the dynamics of the school 

organization, of the administrative aspects, of the didactic and pedagogical structures 

that support the educational proposal and the actions of the involved actors. This is why 

the analysis of curriculum management means identifying the interactions that are 

established between what belongs to the educational sphere (educational change 

policies and curriculum model) and the practices of participants in a living, dynamic 

reality in which the aspiration is to give sense and realization to curriculum. According 

to Castro (2005, p. 14), “the inclusion of curriculum management as a new construct 

allows to conceive the school duty in its essence, its objective”5, since it involves a 

more comprehensive and systemic approach to the curriculum processes and to 

educational change.  

This article talks about curricular management from three conceptual frames of 

reference: educational change (Fullan & Hargreaves, 1999, Fullan, 2001; 2002), school 

and system improvement (Bolívar, 2007; Hopkins, Harris, Stroll & Mackay, 2011), and 

participation of different actors in curriculum design and management (Schwab, 1970; 

Bolívar, 2007; Díaz Barriga, 2010; Díaz Barriga & Barrón, 2014). The context in which 

we locate this work is that of curricular policies in Latin America and particularly in 

Mexico. We have reviewed the theoretical essays and empirical studies on the aspects 

mentioned in relation to the issue of curricular management, and based on a discussion 

of their content; we offer the reader this essay. We will tackle two issues: on one hand, 

the diverse ways to articulate educational and curriculum policies, curriculum 

management and the active participation of the different actors. On the other, the way in 

which different Mexican education institutions do incorporate the actors within the 

design and implementation processes of curriculum projects. 

The method that we have followed in the elaboration of this article includes the 

revision of theoretical essays and research reports on the subject of curriculum 

management, some of them international, but with a greater emphasis on Hispanic and 

Latin American authors, as well as in Mexican bibliography. We also explored some 

web portals with official curricular documents that prescribe the curricular reforms and 

the basic contents of compulsory education. Finally, some research we have conducted 

is mentioned, particularly in the subject of actors of the curriculum. This work of 

specialized literature analysis aims to approach the understanding of the importance of 

curricular management processes in our context and seeks to uncover the challenges 

faced by educational institutions in this regard, especially the Mexican ones. 



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Curriculum management and educational change possibilities  
As the main premise of this essay, we affirm the following: the current concept of 

curriculum is tightly linked with the notion of school system management, since without 

the latter only the formal structures can be attended, and not its transition to the reality 

of the educational institution, and neither to the interests and necessities experienced by 

this institution. In this sense, we agree with one of the most outstanding Latin American 

theorists in the field of curriculum, who emphasizes the distance between the practice of 

curriculum in schools in contrast with the formal documents that prescribe the 

educational model: 

One might think that the efforts that are made to rationalize the construction of a 

specific curriculum project trying to make prevail professionalized pedagogical 

criteria meets the administrative need to define projects on local basis and for 

each institution, in a system of negotiation and accountability towards the 

lobbies of the communities in which the different schools are inserted6 (Furlán, 

1996, p. 70).  

 

Talking about negotiation and accountability means that the different 

participants play an important role in the definition and implementation of the 

curriculum project. As a matter of fact, since almost four decades Schwab (1970) 

already set out that the participation of specific actors for the drawing up and decision 

making about curriculum is essential, such as teachers, experts in the different subjects 

or disciplines, students, experts in curriculum and those who are representative of the 

community. Nowadays it is common acknowledgement that the decision makers, and 

also the directors and people who care for the academic-administrative management at 

several levels also play a significant role for the successful outcome of a curriculum 

project. All of them are (or should be) participants in the design and development of the 

curriculum, so they are called "curriculum actors". The starting point are Schwab’s 

principle known as curriculum commonplaces and the notion of participatory 

curriculum in his 1970 book, where he asserts that, if the participants of the educational 

institution are left behind or marginalized from a curriculum project, what will come out 

from it is a “blind spot” that will eventually undermine the project considering that it 

there will not be any appropriation of the curriculum, less still commitment to take it to 

the classroom reality and to generate transformation and innovation processes.  

However, it is important to point out that the contemporary theoretical debates 

about curriculum and the systemic change that leads to its realization in a learning 

community have been developed in countries characterized by decentralized 

management that guarantee a certain autonomy for decision making. We can thus 

justifiably ask what happens in countries as Mexico, where the educational and 

curriculum models are drawn up by central agencies or are taken in by educational 

authorities and a committee of experts specially appointed to this duty.  

In contrast to rigid and vertical educational models and curricula, which are 

created in a single central government agency (ministry or national state secretariat) in 

this article we assume that the educational institution plays a fundamental role for the 

development of curriculum. So, the educational communities understood as dynamic 

social organizations capable of learn and transform themselves constitute the basic units 

of educational change. This has provided a guideline for the approaches of efficient 

schools, for the improvement or restructuration of schools, in an attempt to understand 

that it is not enough to transform formal curriculum or to prescribe an innovating 

educational model, since the school itself must evolve towards a learning educational 



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organization, around a series of complex transformations where tensions and 

achievements emerge.  

The school and system improvement research, conducted in countries such as 

England, Finland or the United States, has made it possible to understand the stages and 

factors involved in the success or failure of ambitious educational projects attempting 

reform whole systems and effective learning environments for all their students. In 

accordance with Hopkins, Harris, Stroll & Mackay (2011) what is needed is a ‘grand 

theory’ of system change in education that results in relatively predictable increases in 

student learning and achievement over time. Also, it is important to go beyond 

individual school improvement initiatives, to encourage and ensure with relative 

certainty that educational changes occur throughout the educational system wide 

changes, that is, at the level of districts, states and nations. These authors present a state 

of art with a broad empirical base of at least the last two and a half decades of school 

improvement studies. They affirm that in the early 1990’s the school improvement 
tradition was beginning to provide schools with guidelines and strategies for the 

management and implementation of change at the school level. The common aspiration of 

these initiatives was the ‘renewed’ or ‘self managing’ school and there was a greater focus 

upon organizational and classroom change reflected in approaches to staff development 

premised upon models of teaching.  

 

In many countries, large amount of resources have been targeted at programmes and 

projects aimed at improving schools and raising standards of performance. The 

evidence to date, however, suggests that many of these external interventions, 

although very well intentioned, have had patchy and variable success [...] In 

particular, success seemed to elude schools in large urban areas serving the most 

disadvantaged (Harris, Stroll & Mackay, 2011, pp. 6-7). 

 

Thus, since the beginning of this century, successive trends in research on school 

and system improvement research have shown that the key factors in educational 

change are as follows. Note the importance of the participation of the actors, the 

management of processes and programs, the interrelationship of the school with the 

educational system as a whole: 

 A clear and comprehensive model of reform with an increasingly differentiated 
approach to school improvement.  

 Transforming the organization of the school through managing change with 
emphasis on leadership in the quest for enhanced student achievement.  

 District reform and network building (including professional learning 
communities) need to occur side by side, and they need to be linked. This is 

because school improvement is largely concerned with system level changes 

through collaboration and networking across schools and districts. 

 Strong leadership at the regional level is need, linked to substantive training 
related to the goals of the programme and implementation support at the school 

level.  

 

When we have to analyze or describe the way in which a school operates we 

generally use the term management: “the word management immediately evokes an 

‘action’, has a dynamic dimension and besides demands a complementing model”7 

(Antúnez, 2004, p. 167) Management can be understood as a) an action and effect of the 

school management; b) the set of actions that belong to the managerial function; and c) 

a task that is carried out under commission. According to Antúnez (2004, p. 169) “we 



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consider that management is the set of actions oriented towards the attainment of certain 

objectives that are developed in several areas of activity of the school organization and 

in the drawing up and assessment of which take part, to some extent, the people who are 

responsible to carry them out”8. The central place granted to the school and the 

importance accorded to management as a way to support the quality of teaching and the 

students’ learning and leaves behind the vision of teaching as an exclusive objective of 

classroom. This is due to the fact that “within the educational establishments the 

achievement of quality demands both curriculum renewal and new ways of carrying out 

the teaching duties”9 (Ezpeleta, 2004, p. 410).  

The way to look towards educational change broadens if we assume that the 

school institutions, in their meaning of ever-changing learning communities, are a key 

factor for the curriculum policies that aim to improve the teaching-learning dynamics. 

Hence the vital importance of an in-depth understanding of the role that is played by the 

institution’s participants in the educational change processes.  

The policies that have been established in order to improve education have 

followed different discursive logic and political practices, and this has produced a 

pedagogical logic centered on the improvement of the educational action within the 

classroom and beyond, and also political logic around public utility management 

(Bolívar, 2007). For this author, the school institution is the basic unit of curriculum 

development and improvement of educational standards by means of diverse “waves” 

that have been characterizing the curriculum reforms during the last decades. The first 

wave attempted to standardize the teaching practices by means of a technical 

bureaucratic model of control, standards and legal principles. The second wave searched 

for alternative ways to restructure the schools and the curriculum policies oriented 

towards a redesign of their organization and of the teachers’ professional practice, 

awarding increased autonomy for management and curriculum development. The third 

wave considered a curriculum development centered on the school able to transform the 

view of a merely administrative decentralization and to make possible the teachers’ 

understanding and commitment, the reflection about the contents they work with and 

about the teaching, learning and assessment processes, the collegial work they carry out 

and the constant communication with parents. In general terms, this issues are 

coincident with the international studies revised by Harris, Stroll & Mackay (2011), 

Ainscow, Dyson, Goldrick, & West  (2012).   

In our view, this implies to enhance the curriculum actors’ role within the school 

institution itself and to adopt located educational approaches in order to deal with the 

curriculum realization level needed in a given context (Díaz Barriga, 2010; Díaz Barriga 

& Barrón, 2014). What we find underneath this last proposal is a no technocratic view 

of curriculum and the participants’ practices. This perspective refers to a practical or 

evolving approach of curriculum in which the teachers discuss and make decisions 

depending on their real conditions with a view to a possible change that meets the 

conditions of their institution and of their students’ specific needs and features. On this 

basis, the logic of a linear, little flexible, vertical and universalistic curriculum is at 

stake not only because of its inefficiency, but also because of the philosophical 

presuppositions and their ethical commitments. Unfortunately, this has traditionally 

been the logic of the construction of the Mexican curriculum in its different educational 

levels, mostly in basic compulsory education, which contradicts the great cultural 

diversity and social inequity existing in the different regions of the country, and within 

these, between their localities and schools (Pinar, 2011). 

 It is a fact that no curriculum model can be put into practice if we do not 

take into account significant aspects before implementing them. The establishment of an 



Barrón Tirado & Díaz Barriga. Curriculum Management                                                                                            17 
 

                  
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educational and curriculum model is not only a rhetorical question, nor a purely 

technical matter, but it rather “is at the core of the school’s mission and socio-

educational supply”10 (Bolívar, 2007, p. 49). In this sense, curriculum development goes 

hand in hand with institutional development; they are two sides of the same coin and 

articulate themselves in a systemic way with the administrative processes as far as 

management is concerned.  

On the basis of the educational and curriculum model we can prefigure a school 

and organizational culture that produces a series of practices for the different actors 

(managers, administrators, experts, teachers and students) depending on their own 

experience, beliefs, interests and instituted knowledge.  

School, as a cultural construct, adapts --more than adopts-- the reforms to its own 

ways of seeing and doing things, and in so far as every reform entails values and 

views that are more or less compatible with the organizational structures and 

cultures in which the individuals are working, it will need a process of 

reconstruction-adaptation11 (Bolívar, 2007, p. 205).  

 In this regard, there is enough documentary evidence of how the elaboration of 

ambitious projects carried out by experts who operate beyond any kind of dialogue with 

the educational community can be considered as failed experience in curriculum reform 

processes. According to Ziegler (2003), the teachers (in Argentina and Latin America) 

usually are granted the role of “readers” of the curriculum base documents, which 

means that they are considered as recipients of what experts on contents or curriculum 

know. Those normative documents aim to serve as a tool to normalize educational 

practices, but they actually do not have a significant impact, at least not as they are 

expected to, neither on the mentality, neither on the educational practices that take place 

in the day to day school work. And when they impact, they just allow some degree of 

interpretation and appropriation of the reforms, but this appropriation usually remains at 

discursive level and uses to cause significant tensions about professional legitimization. 

As far as it has been studied about the educational change processes, there is clear 

evidence that the intention to shape or prescribe the processes of reconstructing teaching 

and transforming the school institution by means of those normative documents made 

up by experts who do not belong to the diversity and complexity of the educational 

institutions, since they do not express the participants’ knowledge, situation and 

experiences or even feelings, is doomed to have a very limited impact. The question is 

therefore to think up the different levels of authorship and application that curriculum 

involves and not to forget the lessons learned with regarding the different actors of the 

curriculum process.  

 On this issue, Andy Hargreaves (interviewed by Romero, 2007) considers that 

the problem must be revisited from a much wider perspective about educational change.  

For this author, the problem has to do with a poor joint action of schools, teachers and 

educational systems, since those should be reorganized in a rationale of inclusive 

communities able to transform their structure and culture in order to deal with the 

elements that concern them and thus be able to respond to the expectations about 

education of an ever-changing, unforeseeable and uncertain society, whose main feature 

is its diversity and not its uniformity.  

Ainscow, Dyson, Goldrick & West (2012), also speak for inclusive schools, as 

well as for the return of the school system to their historical purpose: ensuring a sound 

education for every child. After analyzing empirical evidence from a series of studies 

carried out over 20 years concerning schools that are effective for all children and 

young people, they argue that it is necessary to complement within-school 



Barrón Tirado & Díaz Barriga. Curriculum Management                                                                                            18 
 

                  
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developments with efforts that link schools with one another and with their wider 

communities. They also conclude that national policies for tackling wider inequities in 

schools and in society are needed. 

 On the other hand, it is very important to understand that in the development of a 

curriculum project several realization levels come into play and that the diverse social 

subjects who sustain curriculum and play a role within it use to do it in a differentiate 

way, depending on the educational project to which they subscribe.  

The idea of a project presupposes the existence of a subject able to define a 

future as an option that is objectively possible and not as a merely arbitrary 

projection. And drawing up those projects is how the subject relates to reality in 

a relationship that is supported by its ability to transform this reality into the 

content of a social will, which in turn will be able to determine the direction of 

the social processes. In this way, potential facts can be predetermined thanks to 

the action of a specific social will. In this context, the appropriation of present 

becomes a way to build the future and, conversely, a project of future, led by a 

subject, turns into a way to appropriate the present time. As a matter of fact, the 

subject only will be really active if he or she is able to make a distinction 

between what is viable and what just belongs to the sphere of desire, this means 

if his or her activity is part of a conception of future as horizon of possible 

actions12 (Zemelman, in De Alba, 1998, p. 76). 

 The decision to implement a curriculum project concerns the whole community 

and its management is not only up to the managerial staff, but also includes the 

teachers’ practice and the intervention of the academic-administrative staff, and its 

appropriation by the students themselves as well. For what concerns the recent 

experience of the Mexican curriculum reforms for basic and secondary education, 

several studies about the teachers’ perceptions show that those consider that they have 

not been taken into account for the process of drawing up the curriculum project, that 

they do not receive the necessary means to implement the ambitious changes that are 

conferred on them, not only with regard to curriculum contents but also to the 

innovating pedagogical models, including the necessary digital skills. Thus, many 

teachers report the urgency with which the curriculum reforms are carried out, the total 

lack of awareness about classroom reality, the scarce participation of teachers in the 

decision-making processes, the lack of school supplies and of infrastructure able to meet 

the new demands, the stiffness or inclusive obsolescence of the authorities responsible 

for school management, but above all the lack of an adequate awareness of what the 

transformations mean for the educational community as a whole (Díaz Barriga, 2010; 

2012; Díaz Barriga & Barrón, 2014). 

When curriculum changes are carried out, the processes become extremely 

complex, because it is not enough to design a technically well thought-out study plan 

made up by experts and based on theoretical and methodological grounds that are 

consistent with the framework of the current society. The former is important, but not 

enough. The transition towards this curriculum model also has to be taken into account, 

over and above the legal and administrative arrangements that are needed for its 

implementation. It is also necessary to encourage the emergence of a totally new 

institutional culture as regards to the role of teachers and students, the change to new 

practices of knowledge and knowhow, and to understand that this change affects all the 

aspects in which the actors of the educational community have been involved at several 

levels. It is also important to keep in mind that every transition period that leads to a 



Barrón Tirado & Díaz Barriga. Curriculum Management                                                                                            19 
 

                  
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significant change entails a cognitive and emotional cost for its participants (Fullan & 

Hargreaves, 1999; Gimeno, 2000). This is why the UNESCO itself (2005, in Díaz 

Barriga, 2010) defines innovation as a process of “creative destruction in conditions of 

uncertainty”13.  

A new curriculum proposal, and in particular if oriented to innovation and to the 

transformation of traditional and institutionalized practices, demands a different training 

for teachers that makes them able not only to understand and manage curriculum, but 

also to recreate it and to build it. The teachers’ professionalization component aside, 

from the point of view of the social sense of teaching the teacher is a key stakeholder 

for the promotion of understanding and coping with the current culture and the social 

issue for the new generations. Therefore, its practice should not be conceived 

exclusively as a major in Education or a functional practice within the educational 

environment, but it should be approached in a wide sociopolitical sense in order to 

influence the development of strategies able to take care and preserve the human life 

and the cultural and ideological diversity and thereby build a more fair and humanized 

society.  

In a similar way, it should be necessary to consider the students as active 

participants of the curriculum projects and their management, and not only as a target 

group. This is the claim of who defend the idea that students can be “active subjects 

who understand the educational environment they live in, who search a sense for their 

duty, who appreciate and re-evaluate their own schooling, live intensely their school 

career, write and rewrite their own story and build day after day their identity as 

students, teenagers and young adult”14 (Guzmán & Saucedo, 2000, p.12). It is relevant 

to point out that the expectations that have been conceived around the curriculum 

models since the nineties have be prone to defend a student-centered curriculum 

approach (Blumberg, 2008; Weimer, 2013). In the case of the university curriculum, it 

means that the student training has to be focused on practice in real environments, the 

solution to complex problems, the analysis of significant cases for the profession, the 

participation in situated projects, and collaborative and interdisciplinary work amongst 

other approaches, all of them very demanding for the future professional in training.   

This means that students also experience the tensions that exist between the 

traditional educational experiences, which position them as recipients of contents, and 

the growing demand of active agents, complex knowledge builders, decision-makers 

regarding their own curriculum careers, that need to be personalized in order to meet 

their needs and interests. Moreover, since the beginning of this century the 

transformation of the learning environments was already tangible (called by Coll, 2013, 

a new learning ecology) towards a new one were students take part to the selection and 

to the drawing up itself of the activities, projects and ideal learning approaches, above 

all at university.  

Finally, it would be important to point out that the role played by the directors of 

educational institutions goes far beyond their administrative authority, since they also 

have to be academic leaders and experts in curriculum management, to develop 

pertinent strategies in order to boost its development and implementation based on a 

scheme that involves the whole community (Hopkins, 2007). On the other hand, there 

should be sensitivity to the recognition and acceptance of difference and dissension 

within those processes, since a good disposition is essential to have an impact not only 

in academic aspects, but also, and not less, on the organizational, financial, occupational 

aspects and those that have to do with infrastructure. All those aspects play a major role 

for the management of curriculum innovations.  



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 Because of all those elements we have been referring to Plazola & Rautenberg 

(2009) state that one of the big mistakes of Mexico’s educational administrations has 

been to draw up centralized and vertical curricula. Erroneously the trend has been to 

take as conceptual starting point that changing curriculum is a task of “technical 

assembly” of a study program, or of what we use to call currently the curriculum map. 

In contrast, taking into account its nature of social project materialized in a specific 

context, curriculum change should be regarded and analyzed from the perspective of 

institutional micropolitics. According to the above-mentioned authors, the change 

within the curriculum structures uses to represent an action belonging to the “disturbing 

intervention” type for the actors of the educational communities, since it puts in motion 

collective imaginations, spaces of power, forms of participation and, therefore, often 

unsettles its position within the institution or undermines its normal practices.  

 One more thing to take into consideration is that it is not possible to talk about 

the curriculum actors from a unifying perspective, as if all of them would assume the 

same stance about the process of change. For instance, when we analyzed the 

curriculum reform that was implemented in a university that is responsible for the 

training of education professionals, we were able to identify at least four stances: the 

teachers who were part of the “experts” and constituted the proactive team supporting 

change; the collective who did not sign up for the work on curriculum but did not resist 

it either; the group of teachers who opposed the curriculum project and organized 

themselves to block it; and finally the collective who showed a certain degree of 

disposition to the curriculum reform but only accepted it to the extent that it needed 

their own project and interests (Plazola & Rautenberg, 2009). 

 This allows us to conclude that the curriculum project will be able to progress or 

will be hindered depending on a series of events that are laid down by power 

relationships, the own features of the changing project, the definition of the specific 

tasks (assigned, assumed or postponed) that are devolved upon the actors.  

 The current literature about educational change and curriculum reforms uses to 

report the resistance or opposition movements experienced by the participants towards 

the planned transformations, above all when those come from top to bottom and outside 

in, since they threaten their position within the institution or discredit their usual 

practices without offering conditions for the expected change, or when the environment 

to change becomes “menacing” from the actors’ perspective. In many cases and 

recently, in our academic environment several participants in education have declared 

themselves opposed to the different reforms and innovations, and the fact is that 

resistance uses to come from menaces (clear or perceived) that are in conflict with 

matters such as public education, laicism in education, teachers’ employment or labor-

union stability, or when the new curriculum map cancels spaces for education and 

training, for instance when they intend to reduce the education of young students in arts 

and humanities, as a kind of repudiation of the neoliberal policies imposed by the 

international agencies for the educational system.  

 

Curriculum and institutional practices 
Curriculum is not an object, but a process where a peculiar and complex 

relationship between decisions and determinations occurs (Beltrán-Llavador, 2010). In 

order to point out the relevance of the curriculum management processes it is necessary 

to know for sure that curriculum is not only that “object” that has been before referred 

to as “study plan”, and currently in its extended version as “curriculum map”. 

Prominent academics of the field have set out that in order to understand properly what 

curriculum implies as a project and as practice as well, it is important to situate the 



Barrón Tirado & Díaz Barriga. Curriculum Management                                                                                            21 
 

                  
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historic and social context and moment in which it has been established, its 

multidetermined nature and the different planes that lead to its eventual realization. But 

it is necessary primarily to identify how curriculum incarnates in its actors and how it is 

developed and managed in a given institution.   

Authors such as Follari (1982) understand curriculum as the set of academic-

oriented practices that are carried out within the higher education institutions, including 

the planning process of those practices, taking into account the fact that it is crossed by 

two planes, the formal-structural plane and the evolving-practical one. The first one 

refers to the legitimization of a kind of knowledge and of a culture by means of the 

determination of disciplinary contents, linked to an educational project within an 

institution and its connection with the social environment and practice of the profession. 

The second level, called evolving-practical, analyzes the operation of the project, where 

actors, teachers, students and management staff direct the curriculum development and 

administration.  

Taking into account both levels, Gimeno (1989, p. 19) considers that it is 

essential to “figure out challenge not only from a political and social perspective, but 

also from the point of view of its technical implementation”15. According to Ruiz-

Larraguível (1985), the selection of contents and their distribution do not derive 

exclusively from the universe of knowledge of a scientific discipline, but it originates in 

the idea the curriculum makers have about society, profession and the kind of graduate 

that the institution wants to train. Likewise, we agree with De Alba (1998, p. 75), who 

asserts that curriculum is above all the synthesis of cultural elements (knowledge, 

values, beliefs, habits) that make up together a political educational proposal, planned 

and driven by diverse social groups and sectors with different and contradictory 

interests, although some of them tend to be predominant or hegemonic, whereas other 

groups or sectors are prone to oppose and resist this domination or hegemony. This is 

why when a curriculum proposal is achieved it always will be the result of mechanisms 

of negotiation or, to the contrary, of social imposition for the different participants that 

are involved in this process.  

It is undeniable that each educational institution makes up curriculum in 

correlation to its interests and the cultural values that it wants to promote. This led 

Apple (1979) to propose that the different kinds of codes and symbols selected by the 

educational institutions dialectally network to the different kinds of normative and 

cultural awareness of an unequal society. At the same time, Furlán (1995) considers that 

it is necessary to take into account the participation, agreement and decision making 

processes linked with curriculum management, considering it as the sum of the 

pedagogical management (related to the training agenda) and the curriculum 

management (that has to do with the teaching project of the cultural segment that has 

been chosen in order to implement it).  

 For all those reasons, we believe that it is necessary to conceive curriculum as 

something more than an isolated educational project. It is important to acknowledge that 

curriculum is also part of a political, social, economic and cultural framework. There is 

no place for the alleged neutrality of stances or groups. It is undeniable that within the 

curriculum process a space for struggle is produced between the diverse groups and 

sectors interested in fostering a specific educational project, which leads to a continuous 

dynamic of denial and/or resistance by the involved subjects.  

 

Curriculum policy and actors 
Nowadays, facing the bunch of neoliberal policies that aim to determine the 

what and how of curriculum, several social subjects, whose historic consciousness 



Barrón Tirado & Díaz Barriga. Curriculum Management                                                                                            22 
 

                  
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allows them to orient diverse actions towards a wider project, have generated a series of 

alternative points of view against the hegemony of the globalizing policies, and 

therefore the tensions and dissent have increased about curriculum.  

 Along the same lines, during the last years a new trend has been strengthening in 

Latin America that considers curriculum development within the framework of policies 

tending to –at least theoretically— the administrative decentralization as an answer to 

the curriculum model “from top to bottom” and “outside in” that has been prevailing, 

heavily concentrated in the national secretaries and departments of education.  

 This decentralization aims to search for new ways to draw up, operate and assess 

curriculum, seemingly centered on the different educational modalities, regions and 

communities, in order to meet the huge diversity (and iniquity) that typifies them. Such 

a process, if correctly implemented, would bring about new ways of participation and 

control that include the selection of contents, the regulation of teaching practices, and 

also a different academic-administrative organization. With this in mind, it is important 

not only to pursue high graduation rates, but also to achieve that curriculum is situated, 

equity-oriented and recognizes diversity as a key value.  

 In Mexico, as in other countries, the construction and implementation of a 

curriculum project, the regulation processes of curriculum tend to lead to an expression 

of this administration in convergent ways oriented to shape the school practice in a 

certain direction. This involves important “top-down” prescriptive aspects that are at the 

same time academic (selection, structuring and organization of contents, 

methodological, didactical and evaluative orientations); administrative (for instance, 

registration systems, grade descriptions, school registers) and related to infrastructure 

(for instance, the technologies that can be used to support the teaching and learning 

processes, educational furniture and environment, instructional materials). Often the 

central administration is unable to manage the diversity of educational contexts, social 

and educational inequality in the country, so that its policies of curricular 

implementation are unsuccessful. By ignoring the cultural capital of the actors and the 

real training needs for educational change, is not provided to the educational agents 

with the necessary means to undertake the project, including the qualification of the 

students themselves to fully apprehend the challenge that a new curriculum involves 

(Díaz Barriga & Barrón, 2014). 

According to Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery & Taubman (2008), for the thorough 

understanding of curriculum it is necessary to take into account various discourses; and 

one of the ways to read it is as a political document. Those authors point out that the 

analysis of curriculum as a political document started during the seventies, in the light 

of the Marxist and neo-Marxist theories and under the influence of the British Sociology 

of Education guidelines. In Mexico, the study of curriculum policies has been a 

component of what has been called educational policies or reforms, and the study of 

this field can be associated to the critical and postmodern school of thought since it 

contains a critical analysis of curriculum. According to Michael Apple, one of the 

functions carried out by the critical analysis of curriculum is the following one:  

[…] to enlighten the ways in which policies and practices are interwoven with 

the relationships of exploitation and domination --and with the struggles against 

those relationships— within society (Apple, 2011, p. 7).  

 The understanding of the curriculum policies and their realization within the 

educational institutions should be critically analyzed not only by experts of curriculum, 

but also by the different actors who take part in the drawing, development, management 



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and assessment of a study plan, given that those policies actually will influence 

themselves. We already mentioned above that since the seventies Schwab (1970) set out 

the need to reach a balanced participation of given persons to the prior deliberation and 

to decision-making about curriculum. However, in Mexico the real participation of 

those actors, and especially of the teachers and students, is subject to interests more 

related to group interests and politics in accordance with institutional cultures, that 

eventually promote --or decide not to do so— the participation in decision-making.  

 The curriculum policies are responsible for establishment and regulation of the 

rules and the political and academic decision-making bodies condition the contents and 

practices of curriculum development (Gimeno, 1989). Therefore, the educational 

policies determine the degree of power and autonomy of the different agents or actors 

and any curriculum construction becomes, at least to a certain extent, a political matter.  

 On the other hand, the curriculum policies are objectified through the drawing of 

curriculum and its normativity. Any curriculum proposes a selected prescription of the 

teaching contents, although this process cannot be reduced to the written document. 

This prescription of what and how is not preserved stably during the curriculum 

processes, but it incessantly changes according to the political, institutional and 

classroom administration.  

 Curriculum policy has been granted the main responsibility to decide about what 

students have to learn in the educational institutions and the means and conditions to 

achieve it as well. This includes the impact that those decisions can have on the 

teachers’, the students’ and the management staff’s practices. In Mexico, the Secretary 

of Public Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública, SEP), equivalent to a ministry of 

education, is responsible for compulsory basic education, regulates private and public 

education, and defines the curriculum policy of the national educational system, and 

specifies the educational degree that should be attained. By means of what is established 

about compulsory schooling, the SEP reveals how it conceives the role of education, 

culture and values that it wants to communicate. In general terms, SEP prescribes the 

type of instruction or socialization processes for the students in the Mexican schools. 

However, there are also institutions, especially public universities, which have 

autonomy status, including the freedom to propose their curricular projects. Even so, in 

all cases, there is a strong influence of international organizations and agencies 

(UNESCO, OECD, World Bank, PISA, among other) in the definition of curriculum 

models, which obey current globalization and neoliberal tendencies. It is impossible to 

avoid thinking that new forms of intellectual colonialism exist through curricular 

policies and international assessments, modeled on economic, labor and social interests. 

 According to Terigi (1999) the transformations that are generally produced 

within curriculum in Latin America tend to cause tensions and conflicts, both if it is 

considered as a normative text that regulates the institution’s training activity and if its 

sense is expanded to the whole of institutional practices that are build day to day within 

the schools (in the teaching and learning processes, in the ways to organize teachers and 

students, in the distributions of times and spaces, etc.). How this change is valued can 

be interpreted in the light of the relations that actors construct between prescriptions and 

concrete curriculum practices. This author points out five features that are common for 

the Latin American curriculum policies and that could explain the rise of tensions and 

contradictions:  

 In a context of educational decentralization, curriculum appears as a 
recentralization device for education. 

 The trend is to legitimize the centralized curriculum devices based on the 
principle of academic knowledge.  



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 Curriculum experiences a process of homogenization of the presentation form. 

 There is a correlation between centralized curricula and centralized assessment.   

 Change is promoted with the school institution as starting point. 

The dynamics of curriculum reforms that have been carried out during the last 

decades in Mexico and Latin America show that curriculum policy can be promoted and 

assumed as a mere official prescription embodied in formal documents, as a control 

device for the processes and actors, or as the possibility of encouraging processes of 

curriculum negotiation and appropriation situated within an educational community. We 

coincide in this way to look at the Latin-American reality with several authors that we 

have read for this article: only from the latter perspective and taking into account 

different levels of curriculum implementation will allow the participation of the 

different actors in favor of the educational change. 

Facing this maelstrom of economic, politic and social changes that have been 

implemented during the last decades, new questions and challenges to the school 

curriculum arise according to the different contexts that are studied. Just like during the 

two decades the trend has been to draw up competence-centered curriculum, favoring 

the competences known as generic or key competences, nowadays the question deals 

with the curriculum content. This is why an emerging trend in several countries is the 

definition of national curricula for basic education, configured around a bunch of 

contents that are considered as basic.  

But the question is what are basic contents? And the answer is not simple.  

The exploratory review we carried out of several documents about educational 

policies in educational portals of Latin-American countries16 allowed us to find out that 

in diverse curriculum projects at national level, the basic contents are part of the 

universe of curriculum contents and imply a selection of what can be understood as 

priority or essential in student education. We revised the curriculum models of Mexico, 

Chile, Argentina, Colombia, República Dominicana, Uruguay y España. What they 

understand as “priority or essential”, operates in different directions. Although many of 

the curriculum models refers to competencies and performance standards, the key 

contents are usually lists of knowledge specific to scientific disciplines, and to a lesser 

extent procedures, skills or attitudes. Why they are the most important contents can be 

understood in different ways. In some models, this basic consideration is accompanied 

by criteria such as the feasibility of its assessment or the guarantee that they lead to 

quality education or even social equity. For other, “basic” refers to a humanizing 

education, or education with a sense of social responsibility. We also observed 

references to the contents that belong to the subjects with a higher place in curriculum 

hierarch (language, mathematics), or to contents related to the promotion of certain 

skills or knowledge that help students to manage in the current world, globalized and 

technologized. In other cases, the basic content is linked to the problems that worry the 

learner and the citizens on matters such as health, security, ecology, living together, et 

cetera. To a lesser extent, contents that allow a multi or interdisciplinary treatment 

between curricular areas. 

Such kind of politic orientation to “basic contents” has given rise for reviving 

discussions about the nature of knowledge and the logic-disciplinary structure of 

curriculum versus the cognitive or psychological structure of the learners, adding to the 

discussion of what is basic the question of social and cultural relevance and 

transcendence of knowledge. Nevertheless, the main concern is that this “back to the 

basic” politics eventually lead to a reductionist and impoverished curriculum that gives 



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priority to factual contents, the decontextualized “cutbacks” of the scientific disciplines, 

that can be easily assessed in massively applied objective proofs. 

We agree that teachers are a key component to achieve “to overcome the gap 

between curriculum as an intention and the mechanisms to make it operational”17 

(Stenhouse, 2013, p. 13), since if the participation of teachers is not taken into account, 

the risk is that the management staff itself forsakes making of curriculum a lever for 

changing education. We mentioned above that when the teacher’s participation is 

reduced to the role of a formal curriculum operator or executor, this happens at the 

expense of the consideration of teacher as a thinker, and then his/her commitment to 

curriculum is at stake. Prominent authors have stated that in the process of construction 

of a pedagogical order, the teacher exercises a professional sense, makes decisions, 

thinks and acts according to certain requirements of rationality and guided by a practical 

reason, in this case a pedagogical one. Likewise, all teaching practice implies a moral 

commitment consisting on the training of the future generations, considering the nature 

of decisions and opinions that teachers carry out about other human beings, the learners, 

in situations of unavoidable uncertainty with severe conflicts of values and visions (A. 

Díaz Barriga, 2005, 2008; Fullan & Hargreaves, 1999; Tardif & Gauthier, 2005).  

In this regard, Valdez (2013) takes as starting point the recognition that the 

transformations that are needed nowadays in the educational institutions must be radical, 

but are, at the same time, very complex and hard to take over of the educational 

community.  

This innovating effort in the educational field generates a very positive 

oxygenation, since as a general rule the new reforms bring with them ideas of 

improvement and inspiring plans that promise to resolve educational and, 

consequently, social and cultural issues, but they also bring along a chaotic 

atmosphere, since the changes imposed from an exogenous dimension represent 

challenges for the teacher (Valdez, 2013, pp. 2-3).  

The main issue about teachers is that during decades they have been taking part 

into practices that differ a lot from what the new curriculum models and proposals 

expect, especially when the transformations are prescribed or imposed by the 

educational authorities and do not come from the needs experienced by the teacher of 

his/her educational community. For this author, it is unlikely that the teacher changes 

what M. Fullan calls “his/her significant structures”, above all because the change is 

presented to the community by means of a discourse that conveys a series of technical 

and academy-oriented conceptions associated with the neoliberal discourse and because 

those conceptions usually do not recognize, or even deny, the meanings that teachers 

have been constructing throughout his/her career and that are part of his/her meaning 

depositories. On the other hand, the reforms use to overlook that those teachers tend to 

react in very different ways according to their knowledge and acceptance of the 

educational models that authorities want to implement in their educational institution. 

The knowledge they have about it varies from familiarity and clarity to opacity and little 

transparency; this means that the farther they consider the cultural object that authorities 

pretend to impose to them as coordinate for their teaching practice, the more negative 

the opinions will be and consequently the stronger the resistance to it (Valdez, 2013). 

As regards the managerial staff and the experts that they use to hire or assign to 

the process of drawing up the educational and curriculum model they will implement, in 

our context we find only a few studies about curriculum management, in contrast with 

the wide literature about teachers. Nevertheless, experts usually report that their role as 

representative of the opinion of the authorities (management staff) or academy (experts) 



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does not reveal any kind of closeness to the community and that on the contrary the 

process takes place in a vertical and imperative way, especially in highly centralized 

and hierarchical educational systems. Consequently, for authors as Hopkins (2007), 

Clark (2000) and Fullan (2001; 2002), a new perspective on leadership is needed, 

because the deep transformation in an institution demands appropriated management 

processes (persons and groups with legitimacy and convening power) able to create 

conditions that encourage the community to take part in the transformation process and 

to make theirs the innovating culture that is implemented within the institution and, of 

course, able to construct optimal conditions to operate and diversify the needed funding. 

For those sociologists who analyze educational change, change only happen when there 

are agents who put forward organization and innovation initiatives that, by means of 

specific actions based on a negotiated participation, prompt the community to 

experience important dynamic transformations both in its structures and in its training 

processes.  

With regard to the students’ role within the change processes, the educational 

discourse uses to claim that all the recent models are oriented to focus curriculum on 

their learning and on their training as citizens of the knowledge society, and that the aim 

is their welfare, development or empowerment. However, the first thing we have to 

question is the background knowledge about the trainees for whom the educational 

policies and models are implemented, since frequently authorities and experts draw up 

models based on conventional socio-demographic statistics but without a full research 

on their identity, on the ways in which they appropriate knowledge, the kind of youth 

culture they belong to, their expectations and interests towards a specific profession, 

amongst other matters. The students use to be objects and not active subjects in the 

design processes of educational reforms. According to Moreno (2010, p. 87), facing the 

educational change process, “students first play the role of observers, and only after 

become the guinea pig of the new curriculum that will be prescribed to them”18.  

If we think that university curriculum targets young adults, why should we not 

re-think their role in constructing it, in making decisions as regards contents, 

experiences or teaching methods?  

Recently, we conducted a study about the way in which undergraduate 

university students experience the process of implementing a curricular reform and new 

educational models (Díaz Barriga, Soto & Díaz, 2015), which in terms of theory shares 

many of the innovations that have been mentioned in the previous paragraphs 

(flexibility to construct a personalized curriculum career, training to practice in real 

environments, inclusion of digital technologies in teaching, tutorship as accompaniment 

to the student in his/her training career, educational innovation, amongst others). We 

found that such young people, although they are not experts on curriculum and do not 

have an evidence a thorough knowledge of the curriculum map of the degree they are 

studying, can recount the ethos of the institution and what is most significant about the 

curriculum management processes. If students are valued and given a voice, who could 

better than them identify those aspects related to null curriculum and hidden curriculum 

within the institution and to the failures in the administrative implementation and the 

alleged didactic innovation around the real conditions of the teaching they receive.  

The most relevant contribution to this study was to find out, by means of the 

analysis of the students’ personal stories in their role as curriculum actors, that as for 

other learners enrolled in lower educational levels, curriculum reality is shaped 

according to the teaching mediation processes within the classroom. In fact, the 

teachers’ attitudes and pedagogic approach, the sense and signification they accord to 

curriculum contents and the way in which they induct students to the “occupational 



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risks” of the profession they are training for can encourage (or not) the willingness to 

learn and the acceptation of the curriculum they are studying. Amongst the most 

recurring issues raised by students we find the criticism to ex cathedra lecture as the 

only teaching method in many curriculum spaces, the lack of an effective training to 

competences for exercising the profession, the scarcity of technologies more appropriate 

for the digital era or of suitable orientation and tutorship processes, the absence of real 

learning environments or of well-equipped laboratories. Some of the students were able 

to identify the ideological disputes and the power struggles between the different groups 

about curriculum, or show a critical attitude toward the excessive bureaucratization of 

the school management authorities or toward some teachers’ authoritarianism, and thus 

question the statement that “curriculum is student-centered”19 (Díaz Barriga, Soto & 

Díaz, 2015). The underlying question, expressed in the students’ discourse itself, is 

finally to what extent the innovating learner-centered approaches, that involve flexible 

curriculum management mechanisms and also a strong personalization of the learning 

paths, since those should be modulated according to their needs, characteristics and 

preferential cultural practices.  

 

Final thoughts  
We should like to reaffirm here that the curriculum implementation is not a 

merely technical issue, nor can it be reduced to the development of a curriculum project 

or a curriculum map, no matter how innovating it can be. The realization of curriculum 

goes hand in hand with multiple actions at several levels within the school institutions, 

both for what regards management and administration and concerning the educational, 

cultural and political processes and practices experienced by the different actors who 

take part in the educational action.  

In this article, we have emphasized the complexity of changing the mentalities 

and practices that have been significant for the actors of the school institution when 

trying to set up a new educational model. Change is desirable and possible when it is 

oriented to the improvement of the educational processes and to the solution of issues 

that are significant for the school community and the society as a whole, but it faces 

many obstacles when the educational policy turns into models that can be very 

innovating from the perspective of the expert who designs it, but that are established 

compulsorily by policies that turn out to be coercive for the actors.  

The literature we reviewed led us to the idea that if we do not take into account 

the levels of knowledge and participation and the subjective sense that the different 

actors grant to the educational model and the curriculum project that comes with as 

well, it will be difficult to favor the appropriation of this curriculum proposal and its 

approval by the community. And even more if the actors are not really involved in the 

design and implementation of the educational model in the institution to which they 

belong, of if they consider it as something alien and distant that has nothing to do with 

their own necessities and commitments.  

But if, on the contrary, we recognize that curriculum management based on 

negotiation and on the participation of the different actors in decision-making can 

motivate a collaborative work, doubt remains about what is the real impact of those 

processes on the school culture and on the daily work within the classroom, particularly 

in contexts such as our Latin-American institutions, and it is in this specific aspect 

where we have to look for different options in order to reach the individual 

appropriation of a common institutional project.  

Thus, it is not enough simply to modify regulations or to restructure the 

management of the educational institution, but it is necessary to develop a 



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comprehensive project that brings together the different interests of the academic 

community and to prioritize a new school culture and puts the emphasis on the shared 

values, working methods and expectations about day-to-day work.  

Far beyond the curriculum contents and the basis of educational model that 

prescribes a specific educational philosophy and a training proposal, in every school and 

university there is an ethos that can be read between the lines as an invisible pedagogy, 

and this pedagogy, according to Vallaeys (2015, p. 1), “is related to the execution of 

routines within the institutions, intersubjective routines that legitimize, in a subtle and 

sometimes not so subtle way, prejudices, values that can hardly be upheld, sneaky 

discriminations”20. In this light, none of the school or university communal life styles 

can be considered totally neutral, that’s why it is so important to disclose the values that 

are effectively promoted by the institutions, the behaviors and attitudes that are 

encouraged for daily life and its possible contradictions, beyond the dynamics of strains 

that are caused when educational change is fostered within the institution. We therefore 

consider that the institutional ethos reflects to a great extent the way in which 

curriculum is managed and the status that is granted to its actors.  

In our opinion, the greatest challenge for the authorities that head transformation 

projects in education, is to be able to meet the external demands without neglecting the 

own needs and to motivate the generation of alternatives of their own. Unfortunately, 

the educational authorities in our country, often operate according interests focused on 

the struggle for political power and institutional control, safeguarding more than 

anything else the interests of the group that brought them to power. 

Finally, we agree with the authors who set out that the school institution itself 

must be seen as the basic unit of the educational action oriented to its improvement and 

promote its transformation as a professional learning community, so that the educational 

policies and the ways in which they are managed can lead to a greater autonomy, to 

more power of decision and to an actual adjustment to the specific situation of part of 

the actors who make up the community. But we do not conceive of the school as a basic 

unit in isolation, since this undermines its possibilities of change. 

In particular, we have highlighted the contributions of the school improvement 

tradition, which is a programme for innovation focusing on change and problem-solving 

in educational practice. Avoiding simplistic and mechanistic solutions, schools have to 

design and invent their own solutions for specific problems and improvement in 

general. However, care must be taken that this is not interpreted as leaving the schools 

adrift, at their own risk, without receiving the support, resources or inputs required to 

bring about the changes. Among the policies announced on the new Mexican 

educational model of 2016, it is said that the central authorities will give a margin of 

autonomy to the schools in the content and practice of the curriculum, as well as the 

possibility of generating their own school improvement project. Although it is stated 

that basic material conditions will be ensured in all public schools, but minimum 

procedures for this are not established. On the other hand, significant cuts have been 

announced to the educational and social budget in the country, one more factor that 

undermines improvement projects. 

 

Notes  
 
                                                 
1 Acknowledgments to the support provided by DGAPA-UNAM through the project 

PAPIIT IN304114-3 and to Laurette Godinas for the translation into English of the original 

version of this article. 



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2 baticon3@hotmail.com 

3fdba@unam.mx 

4 In Spanish, management is translated as “gestión” and in this paper, concerns to the 

ability to organize and implement the curriculum and teaching projects in schools and 

universities. The biggest challenge facing educational institutions is to become self-

managing institutions, especially in contexts such as Mexico, where reigns the 

centralized national curriculum. 

5 In Spanish in the original version: “la inclusión de la gestión curricular como un nuevo 

constructo permite situar el quehacer de la escuela en su esencia, en su objetivo”.  

6 In Spanish in the original version: “Se puede pensar que el esfuerzo por racionalizar la 

construcción del proyecto curricular bajo la preponderancia de criterios pedagógicos 

profesionalizados responde a la necesidad administrativa de definir proyectos a nivel 

local y a nivel de cada establecimiento, en un sistema de negociación y rendición de 

cuentas frente a los grupos de presión de las comunidades en que se encuentran las 

escuelas”.  

7 In Spanish in the original version: “la palabra gestión sugiere de inmediato una 

“acción”, tiene una dimensión dinámica y además necesita un referente que la 

complemente”.  

8 In Spanish in the original version: “entendemos la gestión como el conjunto de 

acciones orientadas hacia la consecución de ciertos objetivos que se desarrollan en las 

diversas áreas de actividad de la organización y en cuyo diseño y evaluación participan, 

en alguna medida, las personas encargadas de llevarlas a cabo”. 

9 In Spanish in the original version: “en los planteles, la consecución de la calidad 

necesita tanto la renovación curricular como de nuevas formas del trabajo docente”.  

10 In Spanish in the original versión: “constituye el núcleo de la misión y de la oferta-

socioeducativa de la escuela”. 

11 In Spanish in the original version: “La escuela, como construcción cultural, adapta -

más que adopta- las reformas a sus propios modos de ver y hacer, en la medida en que 

toda reforma conlleva unos valores y visiones, que son más o menos compatibles con 

las estructuras organizativas y culturas en que trabajan las personas, precisará una 

reconstrucción-adaptación”. 

12 In the Spanish original version: “La idea de proyecto supone la existencia de un 

sujeto capaz de definir un futuro como opción objetivamente posible, y no como mera 

proyección arbitraria. Es gracias a los proyectos que el sujeto establece una relación con 

la realidad que se apoya en su capacidad de transformar a esa realidad en contenido de 

una voluntad social, la cual, a su vez, podrá determinar la dirección de los procesos 

sociales. Así, hechos potenciales podrán ser predeterminados, gracias a la acción de una 

voluntad social particular. En este contexto, la apropiación del presente deviene un 

modo de construir el futuro, y, a la inversa, un proyecto de futuro, protagonizado por un 



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sujeto, se transforma en un modo de apropiación del presente…En realidad, el sujeto 

será realmente activo, sólo si es capaz de distinguir lo viable de los puramente deseable, 

es decir, si su acción se inscribe en una concepción del futuro como horizonte de 

acciones posibles”. 

13 In the Spanish original version: “destrucción creadora en condiciones de 

incertidumbre”. 

14 In the Spanish original version: “sujetos activos, que interpretan su entorno educativo, 

que buscan un sentido a su quehacer, que valoran y revaloran su escolarización, viven 

intensamente su trayectoria escolar, escriben y re–escriben su propia historia y 

construyen día a día su identidad como estudiantes, adolescentes y como jóvenes”. 

15 In the Spanish original version: “la tarea a cumplir tanto desde un nivel de análisis 

político-social como desde el punto de vista de su instrumentación técnica”. 

16 En el mes de agosto de 2016 revisamos los siguientes sitios web para identificar qué 

se está concibiendo como contenidos básicos del currículo; en su mayoría, se habla de 

competencias y estándares de desempeño, los contenidos curriculares son 

conocimientos que se ordenan en asignaturas. 

-Contenidos básicos comunes para la educación general básica en Argentina. 

http://www.bnm.me.gov.ar/giga1/documentos/EL001215.pdf 

-Elementos curriculares, España. http://www.mecd.gob.es/educacion-

mecd/mc/lomce/el-curriculo/curriculo-primaria-eso-bachillerato/elementos.html 

-Marco legal del diseño curricular en Colombia 

http://www.huila.gov.co/documentos/educacion/huilaensena/Acompa%C3%B1amiento-

Curricular/Taller%202/MARCO_LEGAL_DEL_CURRICULO_EN_COLOMBIA.pdf 

-Contenidos básicos del currículo de República Dominicana. 

http://www.educando.edu.do/centro-de-recursos/curriculo-dominicano/los-contenidos-

basicos/ 

-Currículum nacional, Chile. http://www.curriculumnacional.cl/# 

-Documento base de análisis curricular, Uruguay. 

http://www.ceip.edu.uy/documentos/2015/atd/Documento_Base_de_An%C3%A1lisis_

ATD_por_Escuela.pdf 

-Nueva Escuela Secundaria de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Ciclo Básico 2014-2020. 

http://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/areas/educacion/recursos/NESCB-2014_web.pdf 

-Propuesta curricular para la educación obligatoria 2016, México. 

https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/docs/Propuesta-Curricular-baja.pdf 

17 In Spanish in the original version: “superar la brecha entre el currículo como 

intención y los mecanismos para hacerlo operativo”.  

http://www.bnm.me.gov.ar/giga1/documentos/EL001215.pdf
http://www.mecd.gob.es/educacion-mecd/mc/lomce/el-curriculo/curriculo-primaria-eso-bachillerato/elementos.html
http://www.mecd.gob.es/educacion-mecd/mc/lomce/el-curriculo/curriculo-primaria-eso-bachillerato/elementos.html
http://www.huila.gov.co/documentos/educacion/huilaensena/Acompa%C3%B1amiento-Curricular/Taller%202/MARCO_LEGAL_DEL_CURRICULO_EN_COLOMBIA.pdf
http://www.huila.gov.co/documentos/educacion/huilaensena/Acompa%C3%B1amiento-Curricular/Taller%202/MARCO_LEGAL_DEL_CURRICULO_EN_COLOMBIA.pdf
http://www.educando.edu.do/centro-de-recursos/curriculo-dominicano/los-contenidos-basicos/
http://www.educando.edu.do/centro-de-recursos/curriculo-dominicano/los-contenidos-basicos/
http://www.curriculumnacional.cl/
http://www.ceip.edu.uy/documentos/2015/atd/Documento_Base_de_An%C3%A1lisis_ATD_por_Escuela.pdf
http://www.ceip.edu.uy/documentos/2015/atd/Documento_Base_de_An%C3%A1lisis_ATD_por_Escuela.pdf
http://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/areas/educacion/recursos/NESCB-2014_web.pdf
https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/docs/Propuesta-Curricular-baja.pdf


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18 In Spanish in the original version: “los alumnos en un primer momento juegan el rol 

de meros espectadores para posteriormente pasar a convertirse en “conejillos de indias” 

del nuevo currículum que se les suministrará”. 

19 In Spanish in the original version: “el currículo está centrado en el alumno”. 

20 In Spanish in the original version: “está relacionada con la ejecución de rutinas en la 

institución, rutinas intersubjetivas que legitiman, de manera sutil y no tan sutil, 

prejuicios, valores poco defendibles, discriminaciones solapadas”. 

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Barrón Tirado & Díaz Barriga. Curriculum Management                                                                                            33 
 

                  
                    Transnational Curriculum Inquiry 13 (2) 2016 
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Submitted: May, 17th, 2016 

 

Approved: January, 8th, 2017 

 

http://www.icsei.net/2016/icsei2011/State_of_the_art/State_of_the_art_Session_C.pdf
http://www.rsu.uninter.edu.mx/doc/herramientas_RSU/ElEthosOcultodelaUniversidad.pdf
http://www.rsu.uninter.edu.mx/doc/herramientas_RSU/ElEthosOcultodelaUniversidad.pdf