Teachers' sense-making and enactment of curriculum policy - Sylvan Blignaut

The South African educational landscape has undergone dramatic educational changes in the previous decade, impacting heavily on the roles of teachers in the classroom. This article explores the complex sense-making frameworks of three teachers working in three diverse South African educational contexts. Using the construct cognitive sense-making, the article suggests that teachers adapt a curriculum rather than adopt it as is, and that their prior understandings and beliefs about knowledge, assessment and what constitutes effective teaching, combined with the contexts in which they work, frame their classroom practices to a large extent, explaining the disjunction between policy and practice.
From: Journal of Education, Vol. 43 (2008)