Life Sciences Teachers Negotiating Professional Development Agency in Changing Curriculum Times

Abstract

This article probes teacher responses to three curricular reform initiatives from a South African situated contextual perspective. It focuses on Life Sciences teachers who have initially reported feeling overwhelmed by this rapidly changing curriculum environment: adopting and re-adapting to the many expected shifts. The research question posed is: How do teachers negotiate and reinterpret their professional roles and responsibilities in the continually changing environment? A qualitative research design engaged dialogically with 8 Life Science teachers from moderately resourced schools located North of Durban generating insights that were central to their shifting agency of their teacher professional development (TPD). Our findings show these LS teachers are resilient to the changing curriculum times; their collegiality and agentic actions allows for divisions of labour, sustainable ties and strategies for walking the talk. The article concludes by discussing whether these agentic forms of TPD can be generated across differing contexts that are less well-enabled. When productive TPD voice is not activated, curriculum reform paradoxically contributes to (re)producing the existing inequities of context.

The views and experiences of Grade 10 Life Scinces teachers on the compulsory practical examination

“…The CAPS LS was first introduced in grade 10 in 2012, and in 2013 and 2014 it was to be introduced at grades 11 and 12 respectively. This means that during the period of 2012 to 2014 LS teachers were involved in teaching two curricula as a result of the overlap period of phasing out one (the National Curriculum Statement (NCS) Further Education and Training Life Sciences for Grades 10-12) and introducing another curriculum (CAPS LS grade 10-12) (Singh-Pillay & Samuel, 2017). The mandatory practical examination is one hour (DoE, 2011).…”

A posthumanist re-reading of teacher agency in times of curriculum reform

“…The past decade has seen rising interest in teacher agency as a phenomenon impacted by various forces (Priestley et al 2015;Singh-Pillay and Samuel 2017;Tran 2018), with policy implementation as one of the major forces. Priestley et al's (2015) ecological model of teacher agency emphasises the role played by teachers' experiences (past), their material conditions (present) and their aspirations (future).…”

Teacher Agency and Futures Thinking

“…However, new issues emerge when teachers' agency is affirmed. While in some of the literature teachers' agency is seen as synonymous with change, either explicitly [5,29] or implicitly [30], it has also been found that teachers can employ their agency to resist change [31]. In the words of Priestley et al [9] (pp.…”