Struggling Between State Policies and Parental Expectations: Teacher Agency in Early Childhood Curriculum Innovation

• In Event: 77.045 - Changing Policies Changes Practices: Narratives of Early Childhood Education in Contemporary China

Abstract

Government-led, play-focused and child-centered curriculum reforms have been launched in Hong Kong kindergartens since the turn of the new millennium; however, the traditional Chinese culture and the local social context seem to be contrary to the policies, resulting in the situation that many parents still expected their young children to do academic learning as a preparation for future competition. This study employed the concept of “teacher agency” to explore how early childhood teachers responded to the expectations of policymakers and parents, and justified play as an element of early learning in the context of school-based curriculum innovation.

In this study, we conceptualize teacher agency as teacher’s ‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’ (Ahearn, 2001, p. 112) in transforming the educational activities and situations. We view it from an ecological approach to concretely characterize early childhood teacher’s engagement with curriculum innovations from the iterational (past), practical-evaluative (present), and projective (future imaginings) dimensions (Biesta, Priestley, & Robinson, 2015; Biesta & Tedder, 2007; Priestley, Biesta, & Robinson, 2015). Thus we can understand teacher agency by focusing on the interaction of teacher’s individual capacities and the ecological conditions (Priestley, Edwards, Priestley, & Miller, 2012).

To explore how teacher agency was exercised and embedded in the sociocultural context, we interviewed six class teachers in two Hong Kong kindergartens and observed their classroom practices. To supplement and clarify the evidence, this study also obtained interviews with the kindergarten leaders and relevant curriculum documents in the two kindergartens. We then rigorously followed the guidelines for qualitative data analysis (Creswell, 2014) to identify emerging themes.

This study revealed that (1) teachers struggled to develop a child-centered curriculum which follows the governmental guidelines whilst prepares children for the academic requirement from primary school and meet parental expectations; (2) teachers launched the school-based curriculum innovation through the process of incorporating play, in which a more conservative attitude on the retention of academic learning was adopted to align with the Chinese traditional values; and (3) there was an explicit orientation in incorporating play into early learning. A breakthrough finding is that teacher agency mediated to translate the policies and to meet the cultural demands in innovating the ways of early childhood learning.

This study provides significant methodological implications for researchers and practitioners from other ethical or social contexts in interpreting the role of teachers as the agents of curriculum change in early childhood settings. Our findings also call for policymakers and curriculum leaders to support, promote and maintain early childhood teachers’ agency in school-based curriculum innovation.

Authors

• Weipeng Yang, Singapore University of Social Sciences

• Hui Li, Macquarie University