Teacher Response to Curriculum Reform in Science

• In Event: Informing Policy and Influencing Practice: Messages From Cross-Disciplinary Research on Science and Mathematics Education

Abstract

There has been much written about the ‘failures’ of successive school curriculum reform efforts (Kahle, 2007). This paper takes a situated perspective on teacher activity (Cobb, McClain, de Silva Lamberg, & Dean, 2003; Spillane, 2006) to develop an understanding of why teachers respond as they do to a major national curriculum reform. The context for our analysis is a reform to the national science curriculum for 14-16 year olds in England. Introduced in 2006, this reform emphasises the teaching of socio-scientific issues and the nature of science (termed ‘How Science Works’) and provides access to a broader range of science courses, focusing on: the aims of ‘scientific literacy’; traditional academic content; science within vocational settings. Individual interviews were conducted with 45 teachers from 19 schools in each of three years. These semi-structured interviews encouraged teachers to describe and elaborate upon their responses to the curriculum reform.

Our analysis reveals the ways in which the external and internal structures within which teachers work interact with the personal characteristics of teachers to condition their experiences of the curriculum reform (Goodson, 2003). We also show how experiences of curriculum reform can extend beyond the learning of new knowledge and associated pedagogies to involve changes in teachers’ professional identities. We examine how the processes involved might be understood using the notion of boundary objects (Star & Griesemer, 1989). Boundary objects are entities with significantly flexible interpretations that are employed across a network of different policy settings). According to Star this multiple but overlapping usage facilitates ‘co-operative work in the absence of consensus’. A further development, significant within the English education system, is the mechanism of standardization around reified practices: for example, examination results and Ofsted grades. These enable communication across settings, but inevitably at some cost in coherence. Our analysis suggests that the curriculum notion of ‘How Science Works’ is a strong candidate for the status of such a ‘boundary object’ across a network of policy settings.

We argue that curriculum reformers need to recognise the inevitability of multiple teaching goals within a highly differentiated department and school workplace. We also argue for the extended use of teacher role models within local communities of practice to support changes in teachers’ professional identities. Finally, we explore the implications of curriculum areas acting as boundary objects for the development and ‘control’ of future curriculum reform.

Authors

• Jim Ryder, University of Leeds

• Indira Banner, University of Leeds

• Jim Donnelly, University of Leeds