Teachers have been delivered a state-recommended curriculum and students have been expected to do their best by the end of the academic year (Loucks & Pratt, 1979). Proving of that curriculum did really work well may be one of the reasons behind a strong desire for an outstanding performance of the students. The success of that curriculum, however, depends on how it is interpreted by its implementers, that is, teachers. But, before to interpret, teachers need to have some piece of knowledge of the curriculum as a prerequisite. But, what utmost neglected is whether teachers are knowledgeable of the curriculum. Although Kilpatrick (2009) stated that the implemented curriculum is one of three levels of the curriculum that should also be considered when altering it, studies on the implemented curriculum that reflects the teachers’ points of view seem to reveal no sufficiently healthy findings without a better understanding of whether teachers know what they implement or not. Consistently, Bernstein (1974) also explained that teachers have varying degrees of control over the selection, organization, and pacing of the knowledge in the pedagogical relationship with their students. Teachers’ control over the knowledge presented in the curriculum also calls for their being literate of the curriculum and its characteristics to utilize the power of selecting, and organizing the content of it. Despite that power, teachers’ roles, demands, and personal experiences are frequently ignored (Apple & Jungck, 1993; Cohn & Kottkamp, 1993; Johnson, 1990; Kilbourn, 1991; Prawat, 1991; Romanish, 1993; Sprague, 1992). The issue of how well teachers are informed of the curriculum and what support they have to meet their needs while becoming literate of the curriculum is worth being studied since it is also significantly related to the success of each pedagogical change, especially of a national curriculum change (Kalin & Valenčič Zuljan, 2007). The key to successful change is providing assistance to the teachers with the implementation of change which refers to the process of putting into practice an idea, program or set of activities and structures new or different to the people attempting or expected to change (Brickell, 1962, cited in Fullan & Stiegelbauer, 1991). However, educational policy-makers focus their attention and energy on the “what” of desired educational change and neglect the “how” (Rogan, 2007) which may result in strong resistance to policy messages and low outcomes due to poor implementation (Altınyelken, 2010). So, this is a phenomenological study on the meaning attached to being literate of the curriculum and the lived experiences of teachers to become curriculum literate. Research questions addressed in this study are as follows: (1) what is the meaning attached to the term ‘curriculum literacy’? (2) How do teachers experience curriculum literacy? Innovations in curriculum require teachers to transfer curriculum documents into curriculum practice. To be effective, such information needs teachers to have clarity in terms of procedure about the innovation. For procedural clarity, there is something needed to make procedure clear which herein can be called as curriculum literacy. Curriculum literacy, in this respect, can be regarded as a prerequisite for that clarity in terms of curriculum practice, which is often lacking and results in erroneous implementation of the curriculum. In order to make curriculum change sustainable, this phenomenological study will also contribute to the development of pre-service and in-service teacher education programs since curriculum literacy is a vital concept that has been ignored and not studied so far. By means of gaining insight into how teachers adopt and adapt recent curriculum changes, this study is significant in terms of eliciting teachers’ curriculum literacy, to which not much attention have been paid in the literature.

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