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Chapter 12
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-9261-7.ch012
ABSTRACT
In November 2014, the State Secretary for Education, Culture, and Science of the Netherlands ofcially
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 defned 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 frame-
work will be implemented in the year 2022.
INTRODUCTION
Even though “information science” and “informatics” was part of the national curriculum in the Nether-
lands in the 1980s/90s, this was a) particularly the case in secondary education and b) primarily focused
on understanding and be able to work with computers and programming. These subjects eventually proved
very difficult to implement and they disappeared in 2000 from the curriculum (Voogt & ten Brummelhuis,
2014). The discussion about Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education gradually
changed from learning about ICT to using ICT for learning and more and more attention was paid to
the integration of ICT in education as a “tool” for teachers. Yet, about 10 years later, the discussion on
learning about ICT started again, among others because of a report of the Royal Netherlands Academy
Digital Literacy as Part of a New
Curriculum for the Netherlands
Petra Fisser
National Institute for Curriculum Development, The Netherlands
Allard Strijker
National Institute for Curriculum Development, The Netherlands