International Perspectives on Teachers Living with Curriculum Change
This book gives a voice to English language teachers faced with the challenges posed by English language curriculum change. As a core component of national state system curricula in virtually every country in the world, there has nevertheless been little
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Edited by Martin Wedell and Laura Grassick
International Perspectives on English Language Teaching
Series Editors
Sue Garton Aston University School of Languages and Social Sciences Birmingham, UK Fiona Copland University of Stirling Stirling, UK
“This is a valuable addition to research and practice in ELT curriculum change, with a refreshing approach to identifying problems and solutions. It has a broad international focus but concentrates on the individual lives of eleven teachers in ten different countries faced with implementation of secondary school curriculum change. The reality of the teachers’ stories is filtered through interviews conducted by the writers of each chapter, teacher educators themselves. The writers provide a background to the teachers’ contexts and are able to combine the teachers’ accounts with their own knowledge of curriculum change. The result is a remarkable and effective combination of personal stories and their application to theories of curriculum change, avoiding both the dangers of personal anecdote and the sterility of theory divorced from practice. This is an excellent collection and will prove an indispensable resource to all those involved in curriculum innovation.” —Chris Kennedy, University of Birmingham, UK “One of the worst kept secrets in TESOL, and perhaps in education generally, is that the intended impacts of national curriculum change projects are rarely achieved in practice. The reasons for this gap between the planned and enacted curriculum have been documented for many years, yet, frustratingly, these insights have not made much difference to the way educational authorities around the world approach curriculum innovation. This very timely and insightful collection provides further evidence of the challenges that curriculum change often raises for individual
teachers in several TESOL contexts around the world and portrays in a vivid manner the consequences for these teachers of the hurried, top-down, unclear, and nonconsultative manner in which new curricula are often thrust upon practitioners. The narrative insights into teachers’ thinking and actions that the volume provides make it a valuable addition to the literature on TESOL curriculum change.” —Simon Borg, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Norway “This volume is essential reading for (language) curriculum policy makers and planners who all too often underestimate the effort required for curricula change to be successfully enacted in schools and classrooms. Context is everything as we know, but hearing the challenges from the teachers’ perspectives is very powerful. It’s an invaluable reminder of the importance of a multiple stakeholder approach which allows for a close consideration of local realities. Each chapter provides really useful lessons for curriculum planners summarised helpfully by the editors into three critical areas of temporal dissonance, contextual confusion and risk. I will definitely be encouraging my colleagues to read it!” —Alison Barrett MBE, Head of English for Educati
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