Theorizing the implementation of the HIV/AIDS curriculum in Zimbabwe

Abstract

A growing need for utilizing school-based HIV/AIDS interventions the world over has been acknowledged as the most cost-effective means for arresting the spread of the HIV/ AIDS pandemic among the vulnerable youth. However, the question on how teachers as educational change agents and cognitive sense-makers of HIV/AIDS curricula situated in a complex web of systemic social interactions are faring in mediating these interventions has not received much attention in curriculum theorization. There seems to be an underrepresentation in the literature, of post-modernistic approaches to the problematizing and explanation of teacher enactment of such complicated yet important curricula. This article sought to highlight the Adaptation Approach to education and Honig's model and teacher cognition as an example of a post-modernistic approach to analysing teachers' enactment of school HIV/AIDS curricula. It sought to enhance our understanding of the interplay of a myriad of factors endogenous and exogenous to teachers in shaping and framing teachers' individual responses to the HIV/AIDS curriculum policy. We thus contend that one of the major reasons why teachers' efforts to effectuate purposive mediations are so elusive is the failure by theoreticians and policy-makers alike, to consider the myriad of human-generated antecedents in different venues and how these impact teachers' adaptation of HIV/AIDS interventions.