Barriers against implementing educational change

Educational change can take many forms. One of these forms is curriculum innovation in which a curriculum is further developed or being replaced with a new one. Curriculum innovation, as Fullan (2001, 2005) points out, goes through three stages; initiation (the decision to take on the change,), implementation (putting

42 | P a g e the change into action) and institutionalisation (when schools and curricula, on the long run, properly fit due to change in school systems, change in curricula or in both school systems and curricula). However, relying on the context and aims of the present study, only the implementation stage will be focused on in the discussion. Prior moving to the barriers which might hinder the implementation of a new innovation, we should bear in our mind that curriculum innovation remains a plan until it is put into practice. That is, a differentiation should be made between the process of designing and then introducing an innovation, and the practicality and feasibility to implement that innovation in real different settings. The success, or failure, of any curriculum is revealed only through practice. Hence, introducing a new curriculum does not bring any change by itself. Instead, it is only a first step towards achieving a transformative change.

That being said, research (Iskandar, 2014; Gorsuch, 2000) shows that the relationship between the first and the second stage of curriculum innovation is not always in harmony. What is adopted as a new curriculum is implemented differently by different teachers in different settings (Wang, 2002). Fullan (2001) argues that one of the main reasons of teachers’ failure to change their practices is that change is not a linear-process of implementation. To him, curriculum innovators tend to ignore the complexity of implementing a new curriculum. In other words, curriculum innovators presume that teachers will change their role and follow the instructions of the new curriculum once it is introduced.

Changing teachers’ practices from the curriculum innovators’ viewpoints is solely a matter of a sequence of events to be followed by teachers to cope with their new curriculum. This, however, is in sharp contrast with the reality that implementing a different curriculum is not a linear process and is far more than following some prescribed instructions (Rondinelli et al. 1990).

Substituting an IRE approach with a student-centered approach can be argued to be a radical change for many teachers. The new approach asks teachers to widely deviate from their normal practices. Fullan (2001) maintains that implementing

43 | P a g e such a ‘radical’ change has proved to be difficult even in developed countries. In terms of school physical resources and the level of teachers’ qualification, following a student-centered teaching approach curriculum is arguably even more challenging in developing countries, including Iraq.

In this vein, Phakisi (2008) mentions that new curricula have been recently introduced in many developing countries to bring about change. To Phakisi (2008), these curricula seem to be similar to those adopted in western education systems where teachers are more qualified, and resources are more provided than in developing countries. That is, curriculum innovators in developing countries tend to copy the up-to-date reforms introduced in western countries believing that what works in other countries could work elsewhere. Ignoring the many differences (such as school infrastructure and level of teachers’ qualification) between developing and developed countries will arguably make the implementation of these curricula in the developing countries more problematic and, at least to some extent, impractical.

With relation to English language teaching in Iraq, which is the focus of the present study, Akef (2015) states that:

All the English textbooks that were and are still in use at the school level in Iraq are not based on a scientific and systematic investigation of the real situation in Iraq. They were designed either to be used in other countries for different learners or for commercial purposes. Even those textbooks, which were designed especially for Iraq, were designed not by specialized persons. The authors did not investigate the real English language-teaching situation before starting the development process (p. 98-99).

More specifically, the new Iraqi English language curriculum, represented in a series of textbooks called ‘English for Iraq’, has been produced by Garnet Education, a British English language teaching publisher. Hence, the Iraqi ministry of Education did not give the Iraqi English language teachers a chance to participate in making this curriculum. Instead, it signed a contract with a British English language teaching publisher to design a new curriculum for Iraq (Altufaili, 2016).

44 | P a g e Additionally, although this new curriculum was designed especially for Iraq, the curriculum was not designed for IDP camp schools. That is, the curriculum was first introduced in Iraq in 2014, just few months before the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people. As a matter of fact, no schooling within IDP camps was taking place in Iraq at the time of designing and even introducing the new curriculum. Since no authority was given, by the Iraqi Ministry of Education, to IDP camp school teachers to amend this new curriculum to suit their new context, it can be argued that this curriculum can by no means be fully functional and appropriate in camp school settings.

However, even if a curriculum is designed for a specific context, this does not guarantee a successful implementation of that curriculum. As mentioned before, the successful implementation of a curriculum is not a linear process. Lotan and Navarrete (1986, p. 2) illustrate that ‘one of the most important findings reported in the literature on educational change is that there are more differences regarding implementation within programs than there are between them’. In their view, a successful implementation of a new curriculum depends more on the factors or determinants that could facilitate or hinder the executing of the curriculum, than on features of the curriculum itself. To them, these factors, or determinants, are:

The nature of the problem that produces the decision to innovate; clarity of this decision and of the innovation itself; monetary and human resources; political climate; organizational characteristics of the educational institution and its environment; established mechanisms of coordination, control and evaluation; issues of leadership; characteristics of participants (p. 2)

In this vein, it should be mentioned that the factors that interact with the change process, and thus influence teachers’ role and practices in the classrooms, have been classified differently by researchers and authors. Fullan (2007) classifies these factors as regional, institutional and external factors. Rajab (2013) points out that the barriers that any curriculum innovation faces is classified into psychological barriers, barriers related to teachers' beliefs and attitudes, and educational- cultural obstacles. In their view, Dusenbury et al. (2003, cited in Bümen et al. 2014) believe that four main categories may act as barriers against an effective

45 | P a g e implementation of a curriculum, these categories are: teacher characteristics, program properties, teacher training and institutional features.

In fact, CHAT also refers to factors that might impact teachers’ behaviors. To explain, CHAT emphasizes that teachers’ goals (as subjects of activity systems) should not be confused with the object of the activity (the outcome). In other words, if a teacher’s goal is to implement a curriculum in the same way it should be performed, his/her goal will be negotiated as s/he interacts with other elements within the activity. The outcome of each activity, therefore, is different from his/her initial goal due to the influence of other elements within the activity system. Hence, the different elements that interact with the subject can, in a sense, also be viewed as factors or determinants that could facilitate (or hinder) the implementation of a new curriculum.

It becomes clear now that there is no consensus over the factors that influence the implementation of a curriculum. One of the reasons behind this disagreement is that these factors are context-related (Bümen et al, 2014). That is, the set of difficulties that teachers face in implementing a curriculum may change from one context to another. In this vein, it can also be expected that the effect of many of the above-mentioned factors is even more severe in the contexts of the present study where above other things, monetary, physical and human resources are commonly known to be all in shortage.

To elaborate more on the relation between the context of the present study and the introduction of a new curriculum, it can be argued that the new curriculum, no matter how good it may seem per se, is too ambitious to be executed in such context. That is, the Iraqi Ministry of Education ignored the reality that this curriculum was not designed to suit school camp contexts, where schooling is taking place in crowded tents. Ignoring the contextual characteristics of schools is one of the biggest disadvantages of a top-down model of curriculum innovation. In a top- down model of curriculum innovation, one form of the new curriculum is imposed on all teachers from the top, and through power. Hence, teachers from different

46 | P a g e contexts are given the same curriculum and are expected to implement it in the same way.

Hawes (1979) warns that assuming a certain curriculum will work in any context will not lead to a fruitful result. Within this model, context-related questions (for instance, under what condition this curriculum works?) are completely ignored. Instead, a top-down model of curriculum innovation supposes that good things will happen when teachers, regardless of their context-related matters, design their practices in line with their new curriculum (Fullan, 2006). This, however, is in contrast with some research (Rondinelli et al, 1990; Tabulawa, 1997; Phakisi, 2008) which shows that the practicality and feasibility of curricula varies from one context to another. Fullan (2001), for example, stresses the importance of context when any educational change is introduced. To him, ‘twenty-five percent of the solution is having good directional ideas; seventy-five percent is figuring out how to get there in one local context after another’ (p. 268).

With relation to the present study, the new curriculum was imposed on all Iraqi teachers from the Ministry of Education. Although no schooling inside IDP camps was taking place at the time of first putting the new curriculum into action, the Iraqi Ministry of Education did not make then any amendment on the curriculum to be used only in IDP camp schools, nor it gave authority to these schools to ‘contextualize’ the curriculum. Given the constrained educational tools and equipment, the poor infrastructure and the very limited resources in camp schools, it arguably makes it unrealistic to expect that teachers in IDP camps will implement the new curriculum properly or effectively.

So far, it has been argued that change is not a linear process. Many determinants, including context-related factors, could play a decisive role in terms of the extent to which a top-down model of curriculum innovation is successfully implemented. In the next section, the role of teachers’ beliefs in relation to curriculum implementation will be discussed.

47 | P a g e