How Teachers Take the Initiative, Engage the Public, Seek the Common Good: Identifying the Network Effects of Senior High School Teachers Facing the National Curriculum Reform(3/3)

This proposal focuses on the enactment and implementation of Taiwan’s broad sweeping national curriculum reform policy -- 12-year basic education reform. Launched in 2014, it emphasizes literacy-based rather than competency-based, and a focus on “what works” has come to be seen as an efficient and necessary practice. However, as we noticed, the complex process of implementing an educational policy has drawn people’s attention to how can curriculum guidelines be transformed into high school classroom practice? In the past, the major accountability for curriculum dissemination and implementation was the Curriculum and Instruction Consulting Organization both at the national level and at the local level. However, the collaborative governance is now enacted in a variety of ways. Among them, “teachers facilitating teachers” is the most promising one. How did this practice emerge? Understanding policy as assemblages, fluid networks, or entanglements is one emerging and promising shift in the study of policy (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010; Nespor, 2002; Heimans, 2012). Using multi-sited ethnographic tools and actor-network theory, this three-year project seeks to understand and conceptualize the movements and effects of the curriculum reform. Three conceptual tools will be used: translation, assemblage, and performativity. In particular, reform is viewed as networks of translation; assemblage is utilized to describe how people, their material objects, and their discursive practices are brought together to implement the curriculum guidelines; both teachers and students’ classroom practice are recognized as the performative effects of policy. Certain ideas and actors will be traced to examine how commitments and interests are triggered, followed, mobilized, displaced, defended, or challenged. How such descriptive analyses might serve as critique will also be discussed.