Towards Accomplishing Change in Higher Education Through the Co-creation and Enactment of Curriculum and Education Frameworks.

Year-on-year more is being asked of education at every level and higher education is no exception. The recently published EUA ‘TRENDS 2024’ highlights this move noting that contemporary universities need to ‘embrace multiple missions’ thus raising questions on ‘strategy, priority-setting and resources’ (Gaebel and Zhang, 2024, p. 36). The curriculum or education experience, broadly understood, offers institutions an organising structure within which values can be expressed, educational priorities enacted and educational outcomes achieved. In practical terms, as Tight suggests, the curriculum in higher education ‘links the details of course design with the student experience of entering, moving through and transitioning beyond higher education’ and ‘offers a broader, and potentially more integrated, perspective on the teaching/learning function of higher education’ (2024, p. 324). Clarifying through an agreed framework what we mean by curriculum or the education experience, provides a coherent foundation for institution-wide development, enhancement and leadership (Fung, 2017).
This session, which is organised in two parts, presents learning from the shared experience of colleagues from one institution engaged in developing an education framework, and members of an expert external panel advising on that framework development. This collaborative aspect of an institutional, government funded, enhancement initiative involved colleagues from five different European university settings and evolved into an opportunity for all to reflect on framework development and enactment more broadly.
In Part 1, we present an aspect of the answer to the practical question ‘how do you build an education framework’. This was the overarching question we considered together in a series of conversations which took place over approximately 12 months where we explored topics such as: the process of developing an education framework – the who, what, when, how, why; the nuts and bolts of a framework - agreeing framework elements such as priorities, hallmarks, principles etc.; navigating challenges and setbacks; changes you would make and what you wish you had known then that you know now. Our shared conversations benefitted particularly from the range of experience across the group where each of us from an institutional perspective was a different stage of development and/or enactment of our framework. The conversations were elucidated by a comprehensive literature review of the recent scholarship in this area (Ramputh, Farrell and O’Regan, 2025), a review of existing frameworks, a review of context, and ongoing work on campus with an Advisory Group and Student Ambassadors by the organising institution.
In Part 2, we present our discussions as a group in answer to the question ‘how do you accomplish change through the co-creation and enactment of curriculum and education frameworks’. In order to address this second question, we are using Trowler’s work on accomplishing change in teaching and learning regimes. In this regard we are particularly drawing on the idea of a ‘practice sensibility’ or ‘practice-focused perspective’ and how it might be used as a way of seeing ‘three key elements of any change process … [namely] context of change … the nature of any proposed innovation … [and] the relationship between context and innovation’ (Trowler, 2019, p. 121). Specific topics we are considering together include: entering into dialogue and feedback about the framework principles; developing supports for framework enactment; encouraging flexible and various ways of integrating the framework into disciplines and interdisciplinary work in line with a non-prescriptive approach; surfacing resource and other challenges associated with making the framework a reality.