Decision making in senior secondary school curriculum innovation.

New Zealand has a flexible curriculum and assessment structure that enables unique courses to be offered in senior secondary schools. Five medium sized secondary schools that have developed unique courses were examined using a socio-material methodology to explore who was involved in the development and what considerations guided the decision making process. The principal and course developers from each school were interviewed and the data was analysed using Actor-Network Theory. It was found that each unique course was influenced by its specific context. Three conditions were identified across the case studies that enabled the innovative curriculum design: a perceived flexibility in national curriculum and assessment structures, a clear motivation or idea, and a passionate person (or people) to develop and maintain strong relational networks. School leaders can nurture these conditions by clarifying alignment between curriculum innovation, the school's strategic direction and values of the context, by strengthening the connections across the actors in the network and by encouraging flexible thinking about constraints and possibilities. This study provides an example of the use of Actor-Network Theory to explore curriculum innovation and explores the positioning of the environmental context as an actor within socio-material networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]