Digital Literacy as Part of a New Curriculum for the Netherlands

Abstract

In November 2014, the State Secretary for Education, Culture, and Science of the Netherlands officially launched an online country-wide consultation about the future of Dutch education. Based on the outcomes and the ongoing debate, the Netherlands started the development of a new curriculum framework for primary and secondary education in 2018. One of the new themes in this curriculum is digital literacy, which is defined as a combination of ICT skills, media literacy, information literacy, and computational thinking. Together with other subjects such as languages and mathematics, digital literacy will be part of the design of the new curriculum. A teacher design team for digital literacy developed a vision and elaborated this in eight big ideas. Based on the big ideas learning trajectories were designed. These learning trajectories describe what students should learn in primary and secondary education. Schools were involved in the design process from the start. It is expected that the mandatory curriculum framework will be implemented in the year 2022.