Honig’s model and cognition: mutual interaction of implementation elements

For the purposes of this study, I attempt to describe the mutual interaction of the dimensions entailed in the three policy implementation elements, namely people, policy, and places. I adopt the phenomenological-adaptation approach to educational change and Honig’s “people, policy, places” model and cognition as conceptual lenses to analyse how the relationships among the elements frame and shape individual teachers’ understanding, interpretation, and enactment of the AIDS curriculum.

To enable understanding of the central question “How do teachers display their understanding of this curriculum?” I analyse the elements. The questions of which personal and contextual factors play out on teachers, and how these impact on their teaching, as well as teachers’ experiences with the curriculum are addressed by teasing out the relationships among the factors.

It is my contention that in sketching the trajectory of classroom policy mediation of the AIDS curriculum, it is useful to discover and analyse how the choices and actions of certain people at certain places in the education system and broader social systems frame and shape individual teachers’ sense-making and enactment of this curriculum. It is possible to use the above-stated conceptual lenses to discern and explain how implementation of the AIDS curriculum unfolds and to provide grounded explanations of the mutual interaction among the elements that Honig identifies. For the purposes of this study, I present my own sketch using ideas from Honig’s model.

The notion that the three elements of implementation (namely people, policy, and places) come together to form a conception of implementation as a highly contingent

and situated process (Honig, 2006:19) is a conceptualisation that is central to this study.

Since the study regards teachers as the focus of analysis, I consider them to be the key people on whom the various choices, decisions, and actions of people in other places who have an interest in education constellate to determine individual teachers’ responses to curriculum policy.

Honig’s model regards as one of contemporary researchers’ concerns the way implementers respond to fundamentally different implementation goals in terms of their scope and the depth of comprehension in pursuing them. This concern is consistent with my broader interest in investigating how teachers display their understanding of the AIDS curriculum. There is the possibility of discovering in this study whether or not teachers perceive and enact the curriculum goals of the AIDS curriculum as those that, in Spillane et al.’s (2006:55) terms, demand core, or central, pedagogical attention or address peripheral, superficial educational changes.

Research evidence attests to instances where teachers in sub-Saharan Africa have failed to see the HIV/AIDS curriculum with the depth of understanding with which it was seen by policy designers, due to lack of clarity with regard to the specifications of the curriculum (Katsinde and Katsinde, 2002:101; Mugimu and Nabbada, 2010:3).

This has resulted in the curriculum being enacted in a superficial manner.

Within the framework of Honig’s model, from which I sketch my own model, the mutual interaction of the three elements of “people”, “policy”, and “places” can be exemplified by a hypothetical case where policy designers (people) have crafted policy messages (policy) in “ambiguous” and “vague” terms at their level of operation at a central curriculum agency office (places). Consequently, at the local site, teachers may enact the policy in the way they understand it, as they engage in cognitive sense-making.

Honig’s model also puts a premium on how a host of various individuals, both inside and outside the school and the formal education system, including those people not formally named as policy actors, influences teachers’ sense-making and enactment of policy. In Zimbabwe’s education system, the decisions and actions of regional and district education and school administrators have always influenced teachers’

policy mediation. Regarding the implementation of HIV/AIDS curricula, these actors

drive classroom teachers to implement policy, through mandates such as the 2006-2010 Zimbabwe National HIV-AIDS Strategic Framework Plan (ZNASFP) and incentives in the form of financial and material resources, as well as technical assistance to teachers (Chamba, 2011:18).

Contemporary implementation theory regards the professional development of teachers in communities of practice as important teacher curriculum implementation leverage. Pressure and support both drive teachers to implement policy. Smith (2008:191) observes that educational change instruments imposed on a school, such as mandates, combined with incentives in the form of resources have often served as opportunities for and/or barriers to curriculum enactment by teachers.

Also important to note is that Honig’s model recognises the role that those policy agents that are not formally named as formal policy implementers play in making curriculum policy implementation happen the way it does in classrooms. Business leaders, parents, and the broader community have had an impact on teachers’

responses to education policy in various ways. Regarding teaching of HIV/AIDS, people such as parents, health workers, and the broader community have positively or negatively influenced teachers’ implementation efforts at classroom level, causing motivation or frustration. In most sub-Saharan countries, health workers have served as a supportive asset to teachers as HIV/AIDS knowledge resource persons (UNESCO, 2011:16). Similarly, some parents have emerged as barriers to teachers’

mediation efforts, through censoring the content that teachers impart to children about sexuality and reproductive health (Webb and Gripper, 2010:29). The resulting despondency among teachers regarding the teaching of HIV/AIDS in such communities is partly attributable to this scenario.

It is important to highlight the extent to which the interactions among the implementation elements central to this study can evoke the emotional dimension of change. This is an aspect that will be considered through the phenomenological lens of this thesis.

Essentially, the above-mentioned issues thus highlight the impact of certain people’s decisions, choices, and actions as policy actors at certain places on teachers’

classroom applications of policy representations. These people at their various

teachers’ cognitive sense-making of policy in classrooms. With respect to the school as one such venue, the conditions that a school leadership sets have often been associated with teachers’ particular responses to policy. The literature highlights the fact that school principals who capitalise on policy tools such as professional learning communities create context spaces for teachers to interact collegially. Such a scenario potentially engenders radically different teacher learning opportunities from a scenario where such conditions are lacking or absent in schools (Coburn and Stein, 2006:35; Smith, 2008:19).

In my conceptualisation of Honig’s model to sketch the trajectory of the implementation of the AIDS curriculum, I am wary of Honig’s (2006:13) warning against a linear, monolithic conception of the interaction among the people, policy and places elements. Since curriculum implementation is always a complex and dynamic undertaking, such an analytical approach seems to be rather myopic.

Rather, the analytical strategy used to understand policy implementation should be one which is wary of how the dictates of unpredictable implementation conditions account for teachers’ change efforts at particular places at given times. Such a strategy can assist us to navigate possibilities and limitations that confront teachers, with greater openness. It also has the potential to make us appreciate the inevitability of the often elusive character of educational change despite numerous efforts at improving theorisation about education. Honig (2006:13) succinctly illustrates this point when she states that:

[t]he diversity of policy tools simultaneously at play in contemporary public educational systems means that implementers now juggle an arguably unprecedented variety of logics and underlying assumptions about how to improve school performance in ways that significantly complicate implementation.

Honig’s view is consistent with Spillane et al.’s (2006:57) assertion that how teachers and other people with professional education credentials make sense of curriculum reform depends on policy tools that are appropriate for a curriculum. Their prior knowledge and experiences and a myriad of other unforeseeable variables in the broader institutional setting in which implementers operate are therefore important (Spillane et al., 2006:57).

Finally, it is suggested in this study that the implementation process is contingent upon context, where particular elements of the people, policy and places factors interact to produce policy processes and policy outcomes that are unique to given context spaces such as schools. This means that it is not possible to establish universal truths concerning classroom policy implementation. Neither is it possible to make generalisations about the implementation processes of a given curriculum as they occur in unique school settings. I contend that the above arguments reaffirm the spirit of the phenomenological-adaptation conceptual lens that informs this study.

2.3.3 Teacher cognitive sense-making: an ingredient for curriculum adaptation