Textbooks and Curriculum from a Governance Perspective

Governance is a concept which invites exploration of the structure of interactions between the stakeholders involved in a collective institution such as education that leads to a decision and the formulation of social norms such as curricula. In this chapter, we explore the structure of interactions between the stakeholders involved in the governance of the intended, potentially implemented, and implemented curriculum by means of textbooks and curriculum materials in order to unveil how they are coupled within educational systems. We do this by way of three case studies—The Common Core State Standards (Mathematics) in the United States of America, lesson study in China, and Sésamath in France—extrapolated from the literature to exemplify different structures of couplings of the intended and implemented curriculum with a particular focus on the role of textbooks and curriculum materials.