The purpose of this study was to gain an in-depth understanding of teachers` experience of reconstructing national curriculum. For this purpose, two cases were selected. One was an individual teacher`s reconstruction of national curriculum and the oth...
The purpose of this study was to gain an in-depth understanding of teachers` experience of reconstructing national curriculum. For this purpose, two cases were selected. One was an individual teacher`s reconstruction of national curriculum and the other was teachers` collaborative reconstruction of national curriculum. Employing various methods including interviews, observations, and collection of curriculum materials, this study investigated the reasons, purposes, and methods of teachers` reconstruction of national curriculum and the issues or difficulties teachers encountered while reconstructing national curriculum. The findings showed that teachers` reconstruction of national curriculum focused on the method of teaching curriculum. Teachers rarely reconstructed the content of curriculum. Their reconstruction focused on how to effectively teach curriculum, that is, method. The separation of content and method in teachers` reconstruction of national curriculum was mostly due to the standardized test. Because the standardized test was taken from the national curriculum, teachers needed to cover all the content in the curriculum and so had little discretion to reconstruct the content. Teachers` collaboration would help resolve some of these issues, but it also presented other issues. Often collaboration was imposed upon teachers and so it became distorted. Under these difficulties teachers` reconstruction of national curriculum became very limited and rather reinforced the role of delivering the curriculum to students.