Teacher Development and Curriculum Reform

Presentation:  Saeed Nazari

Session C | 10:05 – 10:45 | Location: Room 1004

Abstract:

The reconceptualization movement starting in the 1960s in the United States opened a space to theorize curriculum as an ongoing process of thinking, imagining, designing, restructuring, and envisioning new conceptions of curriculum and their relations to students and teachers’ personal experience. Inquiries into educational experiences of each individual student and teacher opened a new gateway to learn about these lived experience in education. Interest in each student and teacher’s stories through narrative inquiries such as life-writing, biography, autobiography, ethnography, auto-ethnography increased. Before this period, the conventional notions of curriculum were centered on a top-down centralized system of designing and planning the subject materials covered as the course books at schools that overlooked the main participants who were the students and their teachers. As Tero Autio (2003) argues, the reform movement in the United States took place on school level and teacher level. Hua emphasizes that the reform of teacher education and the curriculum reform are interdependent and reciprocal (2015). Intended for developing teachers’ subjective consciousness and independent personality, my presentation will discuss some questions on the reform of teachers in education. How can teachers possibly work beyond a mere knowledge transmitter in education? Is teacher education and development considered the same process as skill training in curriculum reform? Can teaching skills be trained and internalized from outside in? Is teacher education for the purpose of teacher self-actualization, emancipation and empowerment or intended solely for teacher control? Discussing these questions in the light of current literature in teacher development (Hua & Pinar, 2015) is hoped to open a fresh window for teachers interested in curriculum reform.

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