Negotiating Disciplinarity in Elementary Classrooms: Teachers' Constructions of School Knowledge Amid Curriculum Change

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Abstract

The paper focuses on how five elementary school teachers constructed “knowledge” in each and across certain subject-areas during their everyday curriculum enactment amidst an ongoing curriculum change which favored disciplinarity in Cyprus. We identify elements in which strong classification of school knowledge was evident and effected; yet we also complicate this by noticing how teachers, through discourse and performance, constructed knowledge as non-, trans-, and inter-disciplinary. This complexity is discussed as emerging at the intersection of teachers’ pedagogical beliefs, theories of elementary schooling as well as generic and content-specific practices, to theorize curriculum change as unpredictable, non-linear and contextu(r)al and to discuss the possibilities and constrictions of the disciplinary rationalities of school curricula, especially at times of curriculum change.

Authors

• Stavroula Philippou, University of Cyprus

• Stavroula Kontovourki, University of Cyprus

• Eleni Theodorou, European University