Abstract
South African education has experienced significant curricular reform since the mid-1990s, but its implementation has not matched expectations. This study explores teachers’ perspectives on implementing these reforms in schools, with the aim of ascertaining the challenges they faced in the process, and the kind of support, guidance and professional development programmes they received from the Department of Basic Education to facilitate the changes. This article focuses on their experiences of the government-based Foundations for Learning Campaign in schools in the uThungulu district, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Teachers from grades One to Six teaching languages and Mathematics were targeted, and a sample of 20 was purposefully selected. Using an interpretive qualitative research approach, data was collected by means of in-depth interviews, with open-ended questions, and classified by themes. The findings revealed that teachers felt inadequately provided with sustainable professional development programmes, and had minimal meaningful opportunities for classroom support, guidance and monitoring to assist in implementing the changes required. This small-scale investigation offers a stepping-stone for further analysis of assistance being offered to teachers across the country in times of curriculum reform, and thereby contributes towards preparing the ground for a new and integrated framework offering much-needed effective, systematic, ongoing professional development programmes that translate into improved teaching practice and learning success. Keywords: continuing professional development; curriculum implementation; curriculum reform; Foundations for Learning Campaign; monitoring; support
Highlights
The educational curriculum is vital to a society’s success
Analytical Framework To explore teachers’ perspectives in implementing curriculum changes, a framework developed by Rogan and Grayson (2003) was selected and adapted for the purpose of this study, as it offered an applicable way to situate teachers’ perspectives in context and to facilitate a systematic interpretation of the data. This theory of successful curriculum implementation and change is based on three major constructs, of which two are key to the analysis reported in this paper: first, support from outside agencies; and, second, capacity to support the innovation
Participant 6, for example, highlighted the view that there were too few such workshops and that they were not relevant: “We only attended a one-day workshop for the Foundations for Learning Campaign at the beginning of the campaign, after that there were no workshops to help us to improve our teaching of mathematics or languages; if we want to improve our learner performance, the department needs to provide more workshops, but these workshops must be relevant to what we are doing in the classroom.”
Summary
The educational curriculum is vital to a society’s success. within many developing countries around the world, the educational reform process is constantly undergoing change. Recent studies (Maepa, 2017; Mbatha, 2016) indicate that in practice, teachers are still experiencing ongoing implementation challenges and are dissatisfied with the quality and quantity of professional development they receive from within their schools and from the Department of Basic Education. Despite their integral position within the education process, teachers have not traditionally had a voice in curriculum change, and their roles, challenges, personal experiences and perspectives are often ignored in South Africa and elsewhere (Fullan, 2007; Gokmenoglu & Clark, 2015; Kelly, 2009; Ramberg, 2014). The available evidence indicates that reformers have tended to impose change onto teachers instead of involving them in the process (Avalos, 2011; Carl, 2012; Park & Sung, 2013)
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