برنامه درسی به عنوان حرفه گرایی در زمینه: دو معلم ابتدایی در قبرس Curriculum making as professionalism-in-context: the cases of two elementary school teachers amidst curriculum change in Cyprus

Introduction This paper explores how curriculum is made in ways which relate to teacher biographies. More particularly, we focus on notions of professionalism as constructed in relation to teachers’ previous and current school experiences and their constitution as professionals amidst institutional contexts. In the Republic of Cyprus where the study was conducted, the institutional context is characterised by hierarchical relations that have traditionally constituted teachers as a particular type of a professional-as-public-servant. The paper is drawn from a broader project1 in which a small number of elementary school teachers were studied as performing particular types of professional subjectivities, drawing upon a multiplicity of resources that cut across boundaries of personal, classroom, school and institutional contexts. This paper focuses on how teachers’ sense of professionalism is instantiated through curriculum making, thus rendering the latter an active, negotiated and negotiable process linked to teachers’ subjection, subjectivation and possibilities for agency within particular contexts. To explore this complex process, we draw on theorisations of teacher agency and teacher professionalism, which together enable us to unpack curriculum making as contingent and to discuss the (micro) politics thereof. We argue this by contrasting two cases of teachers, Niki and Anna, which brought into sharp relief how their professional history (and in particular their previous experiences of different schools) was at interplay with their current classroom and school contexts, as well as with their general sense of professional role and purpose as teachers. We argue that the ways in which Niki and Anna negotiated official curriculum demands were connected with their differing constructions (by themselves and others) as professionals, which were simultaneously connected with how they perceived their pupils and schools. While both teachers construed their pupils as in-need, the nature of this ‘need’ was perceived as different (i.e. academic vs. Social–emotional), thus leading to different curriculum makings (a more academic as opposed to a more social–ethical oriented curriculum, respectively). By looking specifically at how these two teachers, through their professional school histories and sense of professionalism as they intersect in the present, come to make curricular decisions informed by the past and projected in the future, we argue two points: first, that this shows how teacher agency is achieved in relation to the institutional context (especially in the form of the official curriculum) as teachers do not ‘follow’ or ‘conform’ to this context non-mediationally; second, we argue that these cases illustrate how, when such agency is achieved, in and through the school and classroom contexts, it is permeated with micro-processes of subjection and subjectivation, thus exemplifying the macro- and micro-politics of curriculum making. The following section draws together the theoretical and analytical concepts mobilised in this paper to argue for these points, bringing together work on teacher agency, teacher professionalism and curriculum making, whilst accounting for the Cypriot context.