Literary education curriculum and institutional contexts: Textbook content and teachers’ textbook usage in Dutch literary education, 1968–2000

This article examines how curriculum content in secondary education has developed at the meso- and micro-levels. It does so via the case of Dutch literary education between 1968 and 2000. Textbooks and teachers may wish to focus on literary authors because of their alleged artistic merits or rather strive for literary authors considered likable by students. To examine this issue, we analyze the content of textbooks as well as teachers’ usage of them. Results show author representation in textbooks increasingly resembles students’ reading preferences at the expense of selections made by literary experts. At the same time, teachers have increasingly adopted textbooks that regarded students’ preferences the most. These trends seem to be the result of changes in the student population rather than teachers’ professional characteristics.