School-level policy issues that play out on the work of HIV/AIDS teachers

leaders sitting in their offices falsely think that the policies they have mandated teachers to enact are being implemented as intended. Teachers are thus left to

“sink” or “swim”.

2.4.4.1 School-level policy issues that play out on the work of HIV/AIDS teachers

Within the broader context of the social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of the community in which curriculum implementation takes place, schools exist as autonomous and sovereign systems. They are venues that impose challenges and opportunities for teachers to enact policy by way of not only communities of practice, as alluded to in section 2.3.3, but also other catalytic elements that fuel educational change, such as the school culture and the school climate.

Smith (2008:166) argues that in respect of the culture of a school, when the principal leads his or her staff to develop and establish what people believe in, value, and prioritise, a school climate of collective and harmonious pursuit of the key policy goals that the school sets becomes a key educational change issue. Thus a school principal who fosters in his or her staff the notion of the school as a repository for learning to teach has the potential to involve various stakeholders in mapping out the best ways of mediating HIV/AIDS prevention education programmes. For example, Buthelezi (2008:112) argues that where the policy of a school involves parents in working with teachers collectively, the potential conflict of interests associated with the sensitive HIV/AIDS curriculum can be resolved. For Buthelezi, the value of sound leadership that initiates collaborative engagement by various parties for the exchange of information about the curriculum by way of forums is immeasurable.

Similarly, when the parents are not involved, they might be suspicious of the messages conveyed to learners by educators (Buthelezi, 2008:112). Studies show that where principals and other education administrators failed to give teachers technical, material and financial support, teachers tended to be despondent and indifferent in enacting the HIV/AIDS curriculum (UNAIDS, 2009:10).

Although teachers may face numerous and complex challenges, as mentioned above, some authors, such as Oluga, Kiragu, Mohamed and Walli (2010:377), believe that through their technical expertise as educators, teachers can countervail the pressures from teaching about HIV/AIDS by helping people to move towards assimilating and accommodating new knowledge, without necessarily threatening their cultural practices. Sharing similar sentiments, UNAIDS (2009:8) urges teachers and other stakeholders to discuss and understand the dynamism of culture and to appreciate that culture is not sacred, but owned, and therefore some cultural aspects have to be relinquished in the face of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

The foregoing issues prompt me to re-emphasise the idea that, in terms of Honig’s model and cognition, several people at certain places of the multilevel education system also respond to the complex emotions entailed in teaching about HIV/AIDS and sexuality as contested knowledge. For good or for bad, this impacts teachers’

implementation decisions and actions in their individual classrooms.

In line with the broad Adaptation approach I adopt, I reiterate that despite the myriad of challenges teachers are confronted with in their intervention efforts, their decisions are ultimately encumbered by their own theoretical and professional frames of reference, which can differ from those frames offered by the designers. This is one of the reasons that it would be unrealistic for implementation researchers to expect to find teachers implementing a curriculum such as the HIV/AIDS curriculum with absolute implementation fidelity.

2.4.4.1.1 Implementation influences for the school

As sites for policy implementation, schools are inextricably linked to other places or institutions in the societies in which they are located. Embedded in a social context, as they are, schools present influences that shape individual teachers’ cognitive sense-making and their enactment of curriculum policy. Smith (2009:163)

underscores the impact of the interaction between the school’s external processes and its internal processes. One of the most influential context spaces within and outside the school which serves as an opportunity for teachers to learn about instructional improvement in relation to particular curricula is teacher collaborative groupings.

2.4.4.1.2 Communities of practice

In the postmodern world, which views curriculum implementation according to the Adaptation approach, policy implementation researchers have come to realise that the problem of education policy implementation is one of teacher learning.

In this context, there is a growing consensual theoretical position among contemporary implementation scholars that viewing teacher learning programmes through the narrowly-focused conception of staff development is now out of sync with postmodern thinking (Steyn, 2011:160). According to Steyn (2011:160), the new theoretical position celebrates the more comprehensive continuing professional teacher development (CPTD) paradigm of teacher learning.

Research on the implementation of HIV/AIDS curricula confirms the ineffectiveness of the often one-shot in-service staff development programmes, which have not yielded any meaningful teacher learning (UNESCO, 2011:28).

Following the more comprehensive professional teacher development paradigm that Steyn refers to, I prefer to use the term “communities of practice” (COPs) to terms used for other forms of teacher learning groups, which Edwards (2012:26) variously calls “networks”, “professional learning communities”, “networked learning communities”, and “learning cycles”. COPs represent most of the common characteristics of the more enduring, structured variations of teacher learning groupings (Edwards, 2012:26).

To put the reader in perspective regarding the relevance of COPs to the phenomenological lens I adopt, I point to an observation that McLaughlin (2005:65) makes:

The concept of communities of practice is foregrounded on the notion that the

and concerns in social affiliations and professional discourses rather than on organisational routines.

I agree with McLaughlin’s view that in this implementation-dominant era, education leaders should concentrate their efforts more on capacity building of individuals and schools than on administrative issues such as adherence to timetables, student and staff discipline, etc. I contend that if schools are to be of any worth, teachers must continually grapple with the complex task of making sense of the best practices of teaching that optimise student learning. Hence, equipping teachers with technical skills through learning synergies should take precedence over the supposedly important but complementary administrative tasks assigned to them.

I therefore argue that teachers’ access to a COP, to which they affiliate within the school or outside, serves as an opportunity to enhance their implementation of a curriculum. Conversely, lack of access to a COP could present a barrier to teachers’

effective mediation of the implementation interventions.

Viewed as collective enterprises in which teachers who are held by a common goal or a shared vision engage in collaborative learning to change their teaching practices for the better (Coburn and Stein, 2006:29; Edwards, 2012:26), COPs serve as places for teachers to develop a common theoretical base to respond effectively to education policy.

According to Steyn (2011:162), it is in COPs that collaborating teachers utilise their strengths and complement each other’s skills and knowledge to reflect on and broaden their pedagogical perspectives. Coburn and Stein (2006:30) and Spillane et al. (2006:57) argue that as teachers tease out the pedagogical views of a curriculum, cross-pollinating ideas in social infrastructures, they ultimately develop tangible artefacts that are an expression of a shared repertoire. This process is called reification. In other words, the process congeals into concrete modes of teaching practice, such as “ideal” lesson plans, student assessment practices, and methods which the community renders as a common theoretical perspective that guides individual practice in classrooms. Consequently, from learning in a social context so-called “outer learning” teachers individually make sense of and internalise their own teaching epistemologies in a way that is unique to them as in “inner learning.”

To re-emphasise the value of COPs for schools as fertile venues for the social learning opportunities of individual teachers, I draw on Edwards’ (2012:12) instructive acknowledgement of the notion of schools as being more than the sum of their parts. By implication, in COPs, teachers’ individual capacities are tapped, as teachers share tacit knowledge for the ultimate benefit of the school, while the COPs’

stock of reified expertise, in turn, capacitates the entire school.

However, COPs may not always provide straightforward solutions to curriculum implementation problems. Research has shown that diversity of opinions of community members is a potential threat to sustained coordination of activities and continued survival of the community (Coburn and Stein, 2006:30; Edwards, 2012:17). For example, Cowie, Hipkins et al.’s (2009:25) study of New Zealand’s new Curriculum 2007 revealed that reaching a shared understanding about new teaching practices generated tension among teachers in the community.

Coburn and Stein (2006:27) also point to the danger of a community that has grown strong and has failed to undo a reified practice that it has confirmed as a shared repertoire, even if it deviates drastically from intended curriculum practice.

In addition, in section 2.3.2.1 I alluded to the issue of designer-implementer professional interface, now emphasised in the Implementation-Dominant paradigm of educational change. Whether teacher communities of practice involve or exclude some policy designers in the negotiation and co-construction of meanings has significant implications for the extent to which teachers’ sense-making results in practices that are consonant with policy specifications.

In their study of New Zealand’s Curriculum 2007, Cowie, Hipkins et al. (2009:31) found that being abandoned by a policy designer who had been offering technical assistance to a community led to teachers drastically deviating from policy intents.

Conversely, Edwards (2012:35) observes that in COPs where policy designers as leaders have availed technical assistance with the curriculum, teachers’ shared repertoires tended to gravitate towards policy prescriptions. This observation is consistent with Kennedy, Chan and Fok’s (2011:51) “implementation reconciliation”

perspective. These authors regard the professional interface between policy designers and policy implementers as an opportunity to reconcile the disjunctions

The other point that should be made is that COPs outside schools have been widely criticised for importing into the mother schools theoretical ideas that are alien to the school and that run counter to the particular culture of teaching practice at the school (Steyn, 2011:166). Furthermore, the usually one-off “teachers-only day” gatherings seem to provide inadequate teacher learning time and scant opportunities for in-depth content coverage. In most Third World countries, it has been reported that teachers that have been sent by schools to participate in the gatherings on the