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Shifting horizons : how teachers interpret curriculum in their practice

University of British Columbia

This qualitative study explores how four teachers interpret the provincial arts education curriculum in their practice. During the 2002-03 school year, I discussed ideas with, and visited the classrooms of, four Elementary Level teachers over a ten-month period. These teachers were employed in a rural school division in Saskatchewan. Each teacher taught in a different school and the four schools were located in three separate communities. All grades at the Elementary Level (grades 1-5) were represented among the four teachers. I explored how these teachers interpreted the arts education curriculum in their practice through examining the "vibrant space" (Aoki, 2000) between the provincial arts education curriculum (i.e., the curriculum-as-plan) and the curriculum that was brought to life by the teachers and their students (i.e., the curriculum-as-lived). In this space, new tentative understanding emerged. To support my examination, I turned to Gadamer's (1975) philosophical hermeneutics and the critical dialogue that surrounds it. In describing the arts education curriculum, I referred to the provincial October 2002 draft of the renewed curriculum and recent research in arts education. For exploring the teachers' ideas and practices, I used individual conversations, classroom visits, group discussion, and materials such as teachers' journal entries, school newsletters, and student art works. Based on the results of this study, I claim that there are at least four conditions that influence these teachers' interpretations of curriculum. These conditions are: the individual contexts that teachers bring to bear on their interpretations of the curriculum, the informal theories shaped by these contexts, the availability of resources which support these theories to different degrees, and the reflective practice of each teacher which raises these informal theories for examination. I contend that, through the illumination of these conditions, possibilities of interpretation increase and teachers' horizons of understanding shift to incorporate these new interpretations. To assist in discovering strategies to illuminate these four conditions, a heuristic is presented in the final chapter of this thesis.

Text

2011-02-18

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/31536

Educational Leadership and Policy

University of British Columbia

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