The Implicit Curriculum in Competency-Based Education through Policy and Curriculum Text Analysis
Keywords:
implicit curriculum, hidden curriculum, competency-based education, Kurikulum Merdeka, curriculum policy, text analysisAbstract
This study examines the implicit curriculum carried by competency-based education policy and curriculum texts. Its purpose is to identify what such texts teach beyond their explicit statements, by reading what they presuppose about learners, teachers, knowledge and the purposes of schooling. The study uses critical policy and curriculum text analysis, combining a discourse analytic reading of textual form with the conceptual lenses of the hidden curriculum, the implicit curriculum and the null curriculum. The principal case is Indonesia, namely the regulation that established the Kurikulum Merdeka as the national curriculum, the official learning outcomes for each phase of schooling, and the decree governing the Pancasila Learner Profile projects. These texts are read against three international competency frameworks, the OECD Learning Compass 2030, the European Union key competences framework and the general capabilities of the Australian Curriculum. The analysis finds a shared implicit curriculum across otherwise different systems. Competency texts teach that learning counts when it can be demonstrated and measured, that the good learner is a self-managing and entrepreneurial subject responsible for his or her own outcomes, that knowledge matters mainly as a resource for performance, and that aims which resist specification in advance, including subjectification and slow cultural formation, fall into a new null curriculum. Assessment regimes are the main carrier of these lessons, and teachers are repositioned as designers and auditors of evidence rather than as custodians of knowledge. The novelty of the study lies in treating competency frameworks themselves as curriculum texts with an implicit curriculum, and in deriving concrete drafting tests that allow policy writers to audit the implicit lessons of outcome statements before enactment.
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