Senior Curriculum Manager and Design Lead, Diploma and Career-related Programmes
International Baccalaureate Organization

Netherlands Hub | EUROPE

Ryan Joyce lives and works in The Netherlands, where he is a co-design lead for the International Baccalaureate’s (IB) comprehensive review of its two programmes for learners aged 16-19, the Diploma (DP) and Career-related Programmes (CP). The IB’s programmes of education support their 5,500+ schools in providing a transformative education that promotes its intertwined aims of engagement and flourishing of individuals, collectives, and the planet. 

Redesigning two global programmes of education is the work orchestrating complex system change. With his co-design leads, Ryan considers, designs, and coordinates the interventions needed to influence IB’s ways of working, curriculum materials, school communities, and the broader education systems in which IB schools operate.

As part of this work, he is focusing on establishing educational pathways for 16-19 years that promote inter- and transdisciplinary learning, expanding and enriching opportunities for students to study their first language, designing “core” experiences for all IB students, strengthening IB’s career-related educational offer through collaboration with external partners, and creating ways to make innovations happening in individual IB schools more readily available to the wider community. 

Before his work on the redesign of the DP and CP, Ryan supported a team of colleagues in the development of disciplinary and interdisciplinary language and literature, language acquisition, and arts subjects. He himself led the comprehensive redesign of the DP’s classical languages course—his first passion as a learner and the subject he taught prior to joining IB at The Brooklyn Latin School in his native New York.

He is also interested in the applications of the compassionate systems framework and tools beyond educational settings. As a member of the IB’s employee-elected Works Council, a mandatory representative body in all large Dutch organisations, he is interested in how compassionate systems can inform employee-employer collaboration on policy to positively influence workplace culture and policy design. As an avid consumer of music, he is also interested in exploring the connections between generative social fields and the cultivation of safe spaces in the context queer nightlife.