Curriculum making in high school English: teachers' perspectives and practice in a time of curriculum reform

Abstract

In 2018, the New South Wales Government set a course to reform the NSW education system. English teachers would be some of the first to navigate this complex phenomenon. As a collective, secondary English teachers were already navigating change fatigue, unmanageable workloads and teacher shortages. Against this backdrop, the question of what English teachers think about their practice and how they respond to curriculum reform was crucial to understanding how the intended curriculum is enacted in classrooms. The primary aim of this small-scale qualitative study was to investigate the conditions enabling and constraining secondary English teachers as they enacted the English K–10 Syllabus for the first time as part of the NSW curriculum reform. Taking an interpretivist approach and using semi-structured interviews, I have provided a point-in-time snapshot of the English teachers’ perspectives and experiences of curriculum making. Through a combination of reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022), and the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014b), I identified four salient conditions that enabled and constrained the curriculum making practices of eight secondary English teachers. These included: the vital role of collaboration and ongoing professional learning in curriculum making; the personal significance of using the syllabus to construct student-centred learning experiences and curriculum materials; the complexities of enacting change during a teacher shortage; and the importance of trust-based professionalism. This thesis contributes to the ongoing debate about the need to interrogate and understand the connections and contradictions between the practice of education and the institution of schooling and the phenomenon of curriculum reform. It seeks to do this by focusing on the human impact of curriculum reform at the level of the classroom teacher as they engage in the practice of curriculum making for their students.