Disposiciones relativas a la construcción de vehículos cisterna

Teachers’ adaptation of a curriculum is in itself a theoretical issue that can be understood in the context of a combination of curriculum implementation factors. It is impossible in this limited study to review for analytical purposes all the many implementation factors. Rather it is more practical to examine a few select core implementation factors. Altrichter (2009:7) draws our attention to convergence of various research findings in various localities on what are considered key curriculum implementation factors. Endogenous factors, namely teachers’ pedagogical skills and knowledge, subject content knowledge, and commitment and confidence to teach a curriculum are considered. Factors exogenous to the teacher such as characteristics of the curriculum itself, local characteristics and organisational (school) factors are central to this thesis.

Consistent with the theoretical stance I take that teachers do not faithfully adopt a new curriculum in its original model but rather adapt or mutate it, I tease out the mutually interactive connection between the factors and their impact on teachers’

implementation choices and actions as they engage in cognitive sense-making of the curriculum. I attempt this task guided by Honig’s (2006:14) model, while at the same time using the conceptual lens of the phenomenological-adaptive approach to educational change and the related cognitive sense-making frame. The above-mentioned factors structure and guide the exploration into, and discovery and extraction of those variables from teachers themselves, which they perceive as opportunities for or barriers to their understanding and implementation of the AIDS curriculum. The factors are examined in the context of the broad theoretical framework I develop and offer in Chapter 2, drawing from ideas in Honig’s (2006:14) triadic representation of three key elements, namely people, policy and places and the mutual interaction of dimensions inherent in them and how they explain policy implementation in the classroom. By implication, I locate the conceptual framework within a systemic characterisation of teacher implementation of a curriculum.

For orientation purposes, in this chapter I briefly outline the fidelity and adaptation perspectives of curriculum change, which I shall compare and contrast in Chapter 2, illustrating their potential to enhance or frustrate educational change. I also provide

strokes the essential curriculum specifications to which teachers respond as they enact the curriculum, to make sense of teacher implementation. Finally, I briefly outline the implementation factors which I will apply to the area of teaching about HIV/AIDS and will explain in greater detail in Chapter 2.

1.10.1 Teacher’s adaptation of the curriculum: a theoretical explication.

Planning and lesson delivery are seldom used as yardsticks to determine a teacher’s ability to enact and teach a curriculum, yet these processes are a means to student achievement. This study considers the teacher’s way of planning and delivering lessons of the AIDS curriculum in relation to the developer’s intentions as his or her display of a unique and personal understanding of how the curriculum is implemented. Gauging the extent to which teachers’ adaptation of the AIDS curriculum is congruous with policy prescriptions falls outside the scope of this study which simply seeks to describe how teachers make sense of and enact this curriculum.

In this study, teachers’ adaptation of the AIDS curriculum is generally analysed in terms of the theoretical tensions between the technological experimental (TE) and the implementation-dominant (ID) perspectives of educational change.

Broadly speaking, proponents of the TE paradigm position teachers as implementers of a new curriculum who faithfully adopt it in almost its exact configuration of a perfectly workable prototype during field trials (Berman, 1981:259). This approach is therefore more amenable to implementation fidelity. By contrast, proponents of the ID paradigm take issue with the TE paradigm’s mechanical conception of educational change, recognising the fact that as conscious, rational beings, teachers do not just adopt a new curriculum like incidental instruments. Rather, they adapt or mutate it as they understand it to suit their local use-setting realities and their learners’ needs (Berman, 1981:260; Huntley, 2005:40). Consistent with the phenomenological perspective of educational change which accentuates individual teachers’ personal and intersubjective interpretation (meaning-making) and responding to its conceptual demands in specific contexts, Huntley’s conception of the fidelity-adaptation continuum can deepen our understanding of teacher implementation. Huntley (2005:41) argues that on the continuum, teachers can

faithfully mutate the curriculum and, within a ‘recognisable zone of configuration’

enjoy the latitude for critical and reflexive enactment while guarding against radically deviating to an unrecognisable degree from the essential specifications.

1.10.2 A synopsis of Zimbabwe’s primary school AIDS curriculum and guidelines for its teaching.

In this study the description of teachers’ adaptation of the AIDS curriculum cannot occur in a vacuum but should occur in terms of the guidelines and specifications of the written curriculum, which simply serve as a broad benchmark or criteria to make sense of teachers’ implementation.

However, given the fact that education is a political matter involving some people passing critical policy decisions on what other people should learn (Mitra, 2008:18), the usefulness, legitimacy and pedagogical defensibility of any educational programme are contestable issues. Research indicates that the typically sensitive AIDS curriculum has often been fraught with controversy among stakeholders over the content taught to young school children (Baxen and Breidlid, 2009:18; Lesko, 2010:826). Consequently resistance and ‘tissue rejection’ by both teachers and parents have characterised the implementation of this curriculum. The contention surrounding the usefulness, legitimacy and pedagogical defensibility of Zimbabwe’s primary school AIDS curriculum can be mitigated by the involvement of the country’s curriculum administrative agency, the Curriculum Development Unit (CDU), of various stakeholder constituencies in collaborative deliberation of the revised curriculum (MoESC, 2003:2). According to Mitra (2008:18) the engagement of collaborative educational agenda setting promotes a sense of ownership of the educational programme for stakeholders thereby minimizing resistance. Thus in this study the determination of teachers’ adaptation of this curriculum seems to be based on a reasonably sound curriculum with judicious curriculum prescriptions.

1.10.2.1 The AIDS curriculum described

Broadly based on a learner-centred approach, the AIDS curriculum seems to have been crafted according to the problem-centred design. According to Ornstein and Hunkin’s (1998:206) problem-centred designs focus the curriculum on the problems

of living, and persistent life situations and contemporary social problems confronting individuals and society such as the AIDS pandemic. The major goals of this curriculum are: a) to facilitate the development of relevant attitudes and behaviours in young people and to disseminate information about HIV/AIDS infection to them;

and b) to promote healthy lifestyles, positive values and attitudes and responsible behaviours among the learners while they are still in their formative years (MoESC, 2003:7).

In terms of organisation, the curriculum is presented in a spiral thematic approach where there are the same themes appearing in each grade but with different content.

As the super-ordinate subject matter features, the themes carry specific topics/content for each grade, which increase in complexity as the learner progresses to the next grade (MoESC, 2003:8). The themes are: (a) relationships (b) human growth and development (c) health (d) values and beliefs (e) care and (f) management and mitigation.

In order to realise the goals of the curriculum and to convey the themes the participatory methodology is emphasised. It involves the learners in dialogical educative encounters (which they lack in the home) where they freely and openly share HIV/AIDS issues among themselves in a classroom setting (MoESC, 2009:8).

UNESCO (2005:228) observes that participatory methods of teaching such as role play, poetry, drama, song, picture codes, case studies, letters to the editor, group discussions, debates, surveys, etc. allow collective identification and solutions of problems, involving the learner in self-exploration, discovery, and individual internalisation and personalisation of AIDS-related issues experientially.

By implication the curriculum is not concerned with intellectual actualisation of the learner but emphasises a holistic approach that equips the growing learner with life skills to cope in a world that is bedevilled with the AIDS pandemic. The life skills include (a) communication (b) negotiation (c) refusal (d) cooperation (e) self-discipline (f) self-awareness (g) decision-making (h) problem-solving (i) sympathy (j) empathy and (k) peer pressure resistance and creative thinking. Therefore the teacher-centred pedagogy in which teachers simply tell learners about the dangers of HIV/AIDS without involving them in discursive encounters with the curriculum is not sufficiently appropriate.

1.10.2.2 Recommended ways of teaching the AIDS curriculum

When scheming and planning, teachers must first explicitly state the overarching theme for a particular week and the topic and content that the theme carries, followed by the lesson objectives and the selected relevant participatory methods.

Activities that involve learners in group processing of the tasks in dialogue and action for the internalisation and personalisation of issues and the life skills emphasised in the lesson must be stated (MoESC,2009: 21; UNESCO, 2005:228).

In accordance with the lesson schemes/plans formulated from the AIDS syllabus and its related curriculum materials, such as teachers’ guides and supplementary materials, lessons should thus be characterised by active, hands-on-minds-on involvement of pupils learning in groups with the teacher taking the role of facilitator (MoESC, 2003:14).

1.10.3 Curriculum implementation factors 1.10.3.1 Factors endogenous to the teacher

The quality of teachers’ engagement in cognitive sense-making of a curriculum is contingent upon some of the critical factors endogenous to them, namely pedagogical skills, subject content knowledge, and associated affective dispositions to enact the curriculum. The wealth of knowledge and skills a teacher acquired in college and continues to acquire during full-time service has a bearing on the characteristics he or she exhibits when implementing a school HIV/AIDS curriculum, such as instructional competence, commitment, self-efficacy and attitudes, etc.

(Kelly, 2007:68; Mugimu and Nabbada, 2010:9; UNESCO, 2011:18). Evidence from the literature indicates that poor skills and knowledge among teachers in relation to a curriculum has often presented obstacles to the change efforts these teachers have tried to make (Kirgoz, 2008:321; Steyn, 2011:157). Besides enhancing teachers’

competence in cognitive sense-making of HIV/AIDS policy messages that they mediate into practice, teachers’ knowledge and skills have been found to mutually link with their self confidence to enact a new curriculum (Helleve et al., 2009:62).

The findings of a study of the HIV/AIDS education programme in some South African schools in which initially diffident teachers later gained implementation

confidence and increased participation enthusiasm after being intellectually capacitated (Deutschlander, 2010:444) show the promise that teacher capacitation has on narrowing the policy-practice disjuncture.

1.10.3.2 Factors exogenous to the teacher

How a curriculum is described that is its characteristics, has been found to influence a teacher’s cognitive sense-making of the demands of the curriculum. Altrichter (2009:7) observes that the chances for individual teachers to implement an educational change increase when teachers (and all other implementation stakeholders) perceive or feel that the solutions that a curriculum proposes are really worth the effort. He further identifies lack of clarity of the exact needs, goals and solutions that a curriculum seeks to address as a serious obstacle to teachers’

appreciation of the need for the curriculum. Research has revealed instances where teachers lacked clarity about the goals of a curriculum and precisely what it was that its specifications demanded them to do differently in practice. The findings of a study of HIV/AIDS curricula as part of life skills orientation programmes in some South African schools show the serious cognitive sense-making problems that teachers grappled with due to lack of clarity concerning the curriculum specifications, as well as the complexity of the change (Van Laren, 2010:63). By contrast, a separate study conducted by Deutschlander (2010:444) in some US schools revealed positive feelings towards the curriculum among teachers because they perceived the educational change as being clear. New skills acquired, altered beliefs and attitudes and use of new curriculum materials and pedagogical strategies as features constituting the complexity of a curriculum suggest reculturing – a phenomenon that is rarely found (Fullan, 2001:37). Blignaut (2007:39) underscores how an impracticable curriculum can be a barrier to teachers’ implementation efforts when he asserts that policies that are conceptualised far away from the hard world of practice run the risk of being abandoned by implementers. Consistent with Altrichter’s (2009:8) assertions, Onyango (2009:39) contends that teachers are likely to change and become more capable of effecting school improvement when the proposals put forward by a change initiative practically fit with the situation of the teachers, and the initiative provides concrete, how-to-do possibilities and steps.

Teacher support in the form of skills and knowledge to teach the curriculum is a key variable exogenous to the teachers, influencing how they make sense of and translate education policy ideas into practice. At local education administration level, regional education administrators, school inspectors and education managers who actively provide teachers with professional development programmes such as demonstration, process coaching, expert consultation and technical assistance coupled with follow-through (Altrichter, 2009:9) create opportunities for teachers to enact the curriculum successfully.

At school level, continuing professional development of teachers in relation to teaching particular subject curricula through collaborative learning is an education policy issue that has gained unprecedented attention in education literature in the postmodern world. Spillane, Reiser and Gomez (2006:48) emphasise the value of establishing communities of practice among teachers so that they engage in sharing their tacit knowledge about teaching. Bemoaning policymakers’ neglect of cognition as a distributed practice among teachers grappling with policy implementation, Spillane et al. (2006:48) argue that teachers should not be allowed to teach in isolation and that social infrastructure should be established for collegial teacher learning in schools.

1.11 THE RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY