Esfuerzo Horizontal Máximo y Mínimo

Curricular reform is an attempt to improve the quality of educational outcomes. At its most simple, it is a “hope, of course, that a change of goals, contents, and of the ways and means will enhance teaching somehow and in some way” (Hopmann, 2003, p.459). In this sense, reform of the school curriculum is “widely sought as a key instrument of educational change” (Mcculloch, 2005, p.169). However, curriculum reform also leads to new challenges in teachers’ work lives (Lai, 2010), teacher education (Perez, 2005), school leadership (Niesche & Jorgensen, 2010), and even school buildings (Scott-Watson, 2008). In addition, the transition of moral education curriculum in China from socialism to “regulated individualism” leads to a changing relationship among the state, educational institution, teachers, students in

the new context of China (Cheung & Pan, 2006, p. 37). In the implementation of reform, the hopes and challenges teachers have to face might equally produce enthusiasm or resistance in their professional practice.

Besides being purposeful, curriculum reform is never ideologically free. Reform in curriculum involves contestation that engages the cultural selection, values and aspirations of powerful social groups (Jeffers, 2011). More specifically, underpinning curriculum reform is “a contest over what is chosen, by what process, by whom, with what intent, and with what result” (Macdonald, 2003, p.140). As such, the most powerful groups in society negotiate with less powerful groups regarding the infusion of values and beliefs in curriculum. Macdonald draws three models of curriculum reform in contemporary education systems: top down, bottom up, and partnership (Macdonald, 2003). The top down model or “teacher-proof” curriculum package is aimed “to minimize the teachers’ influence on curriculum reform by developing a tight relationship among educational objectives, curriculum content, and assessment instruments” (p.140). The purported goal of the top down model is the achievement of high level of accuracy between the conception and the practice of curriculum reform. The bottom up model advocates the central role of teachers in curriculum reform and the need for teachers to “own” (p.141) aspects of the changes that are sought. An example of the bottom up model is when SBC locates teachers and the school at the centre of curriculum renewal. Hence, teachers who are perceived as the “real” experts are given more control of curriculum development. The partnership model features “the collaboration across schools, teacher professional development, community, and student input to meet local needs, systematic data collection, monitoring, and revision” (p.142). Macdonald concurs with Fullan’s (1999) claim that “curriculum reform is multidimensional, messy and trying, shaped by local context” (p.142).

These three models can be interpreted through Bernstein’s concepts of stronger or weaker classification and framing. The top down model can be referred to as stronger classification and framing since this model minimises teachers’ influence in the curricular reform. Meanwhile, the bottom up model relates to Bernstein’s notion of weaker classification and framing. With this model, control of the curricular reform is more distributed and teachers have more space to design and develop the curricular reform. The partnership model is placed between weak and strong

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classification and framing. This third model enables teachers to adapt rather than adopt curriculum.

As various groups of people intervene in the processes of schooling through curricular reform, curriculum and education ultimately become a political matter. Bernstein (2000) suggests that, when curriculum reform takes hold, valid questions include: “Which group is responsible for initiating the change? Is the change initiated by a dominant group or a dominated group?”; and “If values are weakening, what values still remain strong?” (Bernstein, 2000, p.15). These questions inform this study’s analytical framework to recognise what values dominate the reform, and which values are prioritised by the research participants in their lessons.

The models of curriculum reform offered by Macdonald allude to political and ideological competition between the central authority and institutions in curricular reform. Within the central authority itself, there is internal competition between competing value sets. Labaree (1997) outlines three competing values in curriculum reform. First, the democratic equality approach to schooling is a belief that “a democratic society cannot persist unless it prepares all of its young with equal care to take on the full responsibilities of citizenship in a competent manner” (Labaree, 1997, p.42). The democratic equality goal expresses a politics of citizenship. Second, the social efficiency approach to schooling argues that a “nation’s economic well- being depends on its people’s ability to prepare the young to carry out useful economic roles with competence” (p.42). The social efficiency goal arises from the taxpayers and employers expressing a politics of human capital. Third, the social mobility approach to schooling argues that education is a commodity, “the only purpose of which is to provide individual students with a competitive advantage in the struggle for desirable social positions” (p.43). The social mobility goal arises from the educational consumer expressing a politics of individual opportunity. These competing values are initiated and championed by different groups in any one society. Labaree concludes that, with competing values within society, education is always vulnerable to change. Such change involves conflict, contradiction and compromise to keep a balance among competing educational goals in the curriculum. When there is a change in the dominant value, there might also be change in education at large. As an example, Labaree argues that the dominance of the social

mobility goal in the United States “led to the reconceptualisation of education as a purely private good” (p.73).

The recent waves of Indonesian 2010 curricular reform reflect a similar competition for dominance between values set as presented by Labaree (1997). In terms of preparing young learners for being what is deemed to be good citizens, the citizenship subject and religious subjects are introduced. Moreover, with CE, students are introduced to citizenship and “competent manners” not only through the aforementioned subjects but also through all subjects taught in school. The social efficiency approach is reflected in the growing importance of the English subject and the ICT subject (Machmud, 2011) for Indonesian students. The third approach is endorsed by the institutions (mainly private schools) which voice intended outcomes to attract parents to school their children in the institutions. These institutions appeal to students’ individual competitiveness for successful student recruitment.

Perez (2005) argues that any attempt to reform education is driven by a nation’s politics and economy. Since education has to become too high priority to empower people to change their situation, to enhance national economic growth as well as to promote sustainable development, curriculum as the centrepiece of education has been reformed in accordance with the nation’s plans at any particular time. In addition, in today’s educational world, curriculum reforms in most nations are stimulated by national “specificity”, as well as by changes in international politics (Yates & Grumet, 2011, p.3). The policies around curriculum in most nations are driven both by a concern about economic competitiveness and anxieties about the loss of cultural identity of the youth. As discussed in Chapter 1, governments around the globe have tried to make use of the globalisation discourse to justify local policy agendas, including curricular reform (Mok & Lee, 2003).

Additionally, Moore and Young (2010) argue that recent curriculum policy has been driven by two competing imperatives or ideologies: “one largely covert but embedded in the leading educational institutions themselves and the other more overt and increasingly dominant in government rhetoric” (p.16). In other words, there are competing imperatives between educational thought and government policies. From the schools’ perspectives, a government’s intervention might be considered as an interruption of the schools’ autonomy.

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The interaction between government policy and educational institutions in curriculum matters has been conceptualised by Bernstein (2000) in his theory of recontextualisation and pedagogic discourse. Recontextualisation is “the process of delocating a discourse (manual, mental, expressive), that is, taking a discourse from its original site of effectiveness and moving it to a pedagogic site, (in which) a gap or rather a space is created” (Bernstein, 2000, p. 32). Bernstein identifies two different fields that are involved in a recontextualisation process: the Offical Recontextualising Field (ORF) and the Pedagogic Recontextualising Field (PRF). The ORF is “created and dominated by the state and its selected agents and ministries” (p.33). Meanwhile, the PRF “consists of pedagogues in schools and colleges, and departments of education, specialised journals, private research foundations” (p.33). Bernstein explains that “if the PRF can have an effect on pedagogic discourse independently of the ORF, then there is both some autonomy and struggle over pedagogic discourse and its practice” (p.33). If the ORF is weaker, there is greater autonomy for schools in terms of space for teachers and schools to develop their teaching practice. This condition is similar to aforementioned Macdonald’s ‘bottom up’ and ‘partnership’ models of curriculum reform. If the ORF is dominant, the local educators only have access to limited autonomy. The ORF’s strong control over curriculum is reflected in MacDonald’s ‘top down’ models. Discussion on the particular curricular reforms that could re-professionalise or de- professionalise teachers will be presented in Section 3.4.

Bernstein elaborates on the concept of the ORF and PRF with reference to centring resources and decentred resources respectively. Centring resources are generated by resources that are managed by the state. Therefore ORF act to produce uniform outcomes or processes across the educational system. Decentred resources are those generated and drawn from local contexts and their specificities, which act to create divergent outcomes or processes.

On this point, ideological conflicts are always present in curricular reform processes. More particularly, the integration of certain subjects into the secondary school curriculum was never free of ideological conflict (Cuban, 1999). Learning from the case of history education in the United States, Cuban identified ideological conflicts following curricular reform happening in different domains, that is, in the process of policymaking as well as in its implementation. From the competing

ideologies in each domain, Cuban identified five different types of curriculum: the recommended curriculum, the official curriculum, the taught curriculum, the learned curriculum, and the tested curriculum. The recommended curriculum is proposed by academic experts or national commissions of educators in terms of the initial thoughts on draft curriculum. The draft is preceded by debates or negotiations among those groups. Meanwhile, the official curriculum refers “not only to its content and structural organization, as displayed in publications for teachers, students, and parents, but also to the social value that public authorities place on particular bodies of knowledge that the young must learn” (p.68). Official curriculum is the documented and published course available to students and to guide teachers.

Using Bernstein’s theoretical language, the recommended and official curricula constitute the ORF’s area of debate. According to Cuban (1999), both recommended and official curriculum contain ideological dilemmas that inspire national debates, such as individual freedom versus civic responsibility, and academic excellence versus equity. Interestingly, Cuban then argues that the official curriculum differs from the taught curriculum. The taught curriculum is “the content, skills, and values that teachers actually convey in classrooms and laboratories” (Cuban, 1999, p. 68). Different from the former two curricula, the taught curriculum reflects the conflict of ideology experienced by teachers in the process of reconciling the official curriculum with the teachers’ experiences, the actual classroom conditions and teachers’ beliefs about teaching:

The taught curriculum resides in the classroom where ordinary teachers, not noted educators or officials, live these dilemmas daily. ... Strong constraints force teachers to make practical choices. .... Of course, teachers are indirectly affected by the ideological dilemmas embedded in policy talk, and revision in the official curriculum. But, what shapes routine classroom practices, far more than policy talk or adopted policies, are the past experiences of teachers as students, their preparation for teaching, their beliefs about teaching, the organisational realities of a high school workplace, and the students that sit in front of them. Because of all of these influences, and because teachers also share in the common democratic ideology of opposing beliefs, they juggle conflicting values and make practical choices that constitute their daily work. It is these classroom dilemmas that teachers face each time they prepare lessons and meet their

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students which will continue to create gaps between the other curricula and what teachers teach. (Cuban, 1999, p. 84)

Cuban’s argument is important for this research: the existence of a gap between the official and taught curricula is caused by conflicting ideologies between what Bernstein calls the ORF and the PRF. Cuban’s idea of a “gap” is similar to Bernstein’s notion of a discursive gap when he theorized the intrusion of ideologies in teachers’ work of recontextualisation. The concept of recontextualisation is discussed in more detail in Section 3.4.2.

In addition, the ORF’s recommended and official curricula derive from somewhat utopian thoughts. In contrast to the conflicting ideologies that shape the ORF’s recommended and official curricula, the taught curriculum is viewed as the pragmatic reality for teachers. The gap between the official and taught curriculum is the result of teachers’ strategies to adapt the official curriculum to the real condition of classrooms, teachers’ professional identity, or even teachers’ misunderstandings of basic concept of the official curriculum and so forth. This gap can be assumed to be a common element in any curricular enactment.

The practical conduct of teachers in their classroom must deal with the ideal concepts documented in recommended and official curriculum. In this way, any slippage through recontextualisation should not just to be celebrated as evidence of teachers’ professionalism. Rather, this research is equally concerned about the potential when the discursive gap empties the curriculum of the powerful knowledge intended by the curricular reform. By examining what dilemmas teachers have in their implementation of curricular reform, this research considers the implications of the discursive gap and its potentials.