The ecology of dialogic interactions towards sustainability of school-based curriculum development

The 21st century education requires schools to provide students with better support in their learning. One way to facilitate this change is through school-based curriculum development (SBCD). Much in the literature talked about SBCD outcomes on respective key stakeholders in schools, but little has been said about the interactions amongst the stakeholders in the process of implementing SBCD. This study examined the interactions amongst school leaders, key personnel and teachers in implementing curriculum innovation in a newly founded government school in Singapore. The findings reveal that the dialogic interactions amongst the stakeholders were reflexively shaping and shaped by the culture of collective sharing and learning in the school. These dynamic, reflexive interactions were coexisting and interplaying with the chains linking one with another, forming an ecology of dialogic interactions amongst the stakeholders. We argue that with an effective enactment of distributed leadership, top-down visioning could be embraced and practised by teachers, and the ecology of dialogical interactions has great potential to sustain SBCD in schools.