The Sustainability of Curriculum Reform and Implementation Through Teacher Participation: Evidence from Social Studies Teachers

Abstract

Globally, there is a movement toward curriculum development and reform as states, governments, and education departments work to provide future-focused curricula to address the demands and difficulties of the 21st century. Despite public knowledge that curriculum reform and implementation are universal trends infested with intractable challenges, little is understood about why the participation of teachers in reform activities from design through implementation should be considered essential. This paper, a part of earlier work, reports on a qualitative case study examining how teachers made sense of their participation in curriculum reform and implementation activities. Twelve teachers representing six primary schools in Zimbabwe were interviewed in Focus Group Discussions and semi-structured interviews to gather data. Using the sense-making theory as a lens, thematic analysis of qualitative data suggests that teacher participation in curriculum reforms enables teachers to be co-designers, which in turn improves ownership of the innovations, leading to an improved implementation fidelity of the new curriculum as teachers are provided with the authority to go through the implementation process with a comparable level of rigor as policymakers. These insights could inform curriculum design and development policy, potentially improving curriculum implementation worldwide. The study implores policymakers to rope in teachers as potent fountains of curriculum content and as partners in curriculum design and development. The study contributes to scholarship on policy formulation and implementation in educational settings.