Teachers' roles in the institutional work of curriculum reforms [electronic resource] : comparing cases from Botswana and South Africa
Keywords: Education.

Education reforms in Botswana and South Africa exemplify change attempts in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where billions of dollars have been invested in institutional changes that seem to have failed. Although Botswana and South Africa have initiated a number of curriculum reforms, exemplified by processes that began almost simultaneously in the early 2000s, students from Botswana typically have had higher test scores than their South African counterparts. Divergences in the educational outcomes of the adjacent countries point to differences in their socio-political histories, and raise questions about differences in their respective curriculum reform processes and outcomes. Given the consensus that teachers are key to change in educational reforms worldwide (Kilpatrick, 2009), this study specifically focuses on the roles of teachers in the reform of the primary school mathematics curricula of the respective countries. Within the framework provided by institutional theory on institutional processes (Scott, 2001), curriculum reforms are conceptualized as multi-level change processes (Pettigrew, 1997), with teachers' roles emerging from specific histories and socio-political contexts that may differ from one country to another (Thornton & Ocasio, 2008). Findings from three perspectives are presented from analyses of documents, interviews of policymakers and teachers, teacher surveys, assessments, and classroom data from schools along the Botswana-South Africa border. First, at the societal level, teachers engaged in reforms as members of society involved in societal reform processes spanning decades, out of which emerged education policies within their specific socio-political contexts. Second, at the organizational field level, teachers were inhabitants of multiple organizations including schools, government agencies, teacher training institutes, and teacher unions and professional organizations over multiple years, during which they participated in teaching and non-teaching activities, such as curriculum development and providing curriculum support. Third, at the group level, teachers were members of groups -- curriculum formulation committees -- made up of functionally diverse committee members, who spent several months in the early 2000s developing curriculum materials that were then used in schools during the 2009 school year. In the South African context where there had been a rush to move away from apartheid-era education, faster-paced formulation processes were associated with relatively limited feedback from practicing primary school teachers for adapting and finalizing the curriculum produced. A more ambitious curriculum with a relatively bigger scope and less structure emerged in South Africa, as compared with Botswana. Botswana's curriculum was associated with smaller gaps between intended and actual curriculum coverage among sampled teachers from the Botswana side of the two countries' shared border, relative to the case of teachers using the South African curriculum across the border. Although the cases studied of reform processes do not allow for making grand causal claims, they show that teachers are neither completely "trapped by institutional arrangements" of policies, nor are they "hypermuscular institutional entrepreneurs" whose agency in shaping reforms knows no bounds (Lawrence et al., 2009, p. 1). The study emphasizes history in showing how Botswana and South Africa teachers' teaching and non-teaching roles in the 2000s either benefitted from or were constrained by policies, organizational structures, and curricula that they had partly contributed to disrupting or creating in prior periods.