Abstract
Ph.D.
This study highlights the complex interrelationship of theory and practice in teacher education by focusing on how a cohort of teachers at one university in Zimbabwe drew on a particular educational theory to rethink their pedagogical practices. It investigates how teachers who were taught a compulsory module called Curriculum Theory during a Bachelor of Education Degree (in-service) programme drew (or not) on the theory to rethink their pedagogical practices when enacting lessons in History at secondary school level. The Curriculum theory taught was informed by reconceptualist notions of curriculum theorising that foreground curriculum as a socially and historically constructed text. The module aimed at sensitizing teachers to socially just pedagogies that could be considered affirming of the pupils’ lived realities. The assumption was that they would be more critically conscious of what and how they teach the subject matter of history after exposure to the module. Given that History is arguably the most politically sensitive of all school subjects, I was interested in how notions of curriculum as contested and contestable were considered. To operationalise the study I employed the notion of modes of address as a heuristic through which I could seek to understand teachers’ pedagogical forms of communication during History lessons. A Critical research paradigm and, in particular, the concept of bricolage was adopted to foreground a multi-methodological approach in examining transformationist and emancipatory notions within education practice. The findings of this study reveal how the teachers had to varying degrees understood the theory-practice nexus emphasised in the in-service programme. In nuanced ways they rethought their pedagogical practices and operationalized their newly acquired thinking when designing and teaching lessons. Exposure to the theory enhanced the teachers’ understanding of the importance of translating into practice the purposes of history in ways that demonstrated its non-neutrality as a subject. The conclusion is that they understood that the curriculum could not be neutral and reframed the subject matter by employing modes of address that invoked the lived realities of the students within the policy constraints under which they worked.