Curriculum and teachers: An encounter of languages and literatures

This paper focuses on an innovative curriculum for teaching culturally valued texts and the issues around the curriculum's implementation by teachers. The writers of this curriculum considered the subject-matter of this curriculum as a cultural 'language' containing specific concepts, attitudes, and modes of thought. The curriculum itself is seen as a 'literature' by means of which the subject-matter is formed into an educational approach. I argue that the actual encounter between the teachers and the written curriculum can be seen as an encounter between different subject-matters and different educational approaches of the curriculum and the teachers. In the encounter the teachers create their own approaches for teaching the culturally-valued texts, and this is different from the one offered them by the writers of the curriculum. I contend that the lack of compatibility between the subject-matter and educational understandings of the curriculum writers and teachers may explain why the teachers failed to adopt the approach of the curriculum.