There has been a strong emphasis internationally on teachers’ professional communities and teachers being reflective practitioners to leverage the quality of education, and subsequently a recent call for a fine-grained analysis of how these relationships may explain teachers’ educational practices. This paper offers a response to this by examining how teachers’ personal reflexivity and ego-networks play a role in mediating curriculum making practices.

Reflexivity enables people to consider themselves and their social environment to navigate their way in their social contexts (Archer, 2007). Although all people practise reflexivity, the kind of internal conversations and the way reflexivity leads to action are not universal. Archer proposes four distinctive modes of reflexivity, which are multifaceted and contextually dependent, to contribute to our understanding of why people act in certain ways. The other key theoretical construct in this study is ego-network which is a personal network that focuses on the individual actors and their connections to other people with a particular purpose (Bellotti, 2015). These two key constructs provide an account of how teachers’ internal and external conversations as well as their interplay act as a mediatory role in curriculum making practices.

This research is designed as a multi-case study by utilizing an embedded-mixed method. Eight secondary school teachers, of six from Scotland and two from Wales, with different subject backgrounds, participated in this research over one semester during 2018-2019. Data generation process involved non-participant observations, semi-structured interviews, producing reflective diaries, completing the Internal Conversation Indicator and ego-network interviews. Critical realism as a philosophical framework was used to make sense of the data and explain the interplay between the two constructs (Danermark, Ekström, Jakobsen, & Karlsson, 2002). One of the main arguments of critical realism is that the social world is stratified by distinguishing what we can observe at the empirical and the unobservable ‘real’ world. In other words, critical realism holds the idea that the objective world exists independently and even without our knowledge of it (Bhaskar, 1998). The ultimate aim of social research is to identify underlying mechanisms at the real world, that are unobservable but generate the events that we can empirically observe.

Findings suggest that the role of reflexivity and ego-networks shed light on why teacher mediation of curriculum making practices occur differently at different times and contexts. This paper argues that there are three relational and transformative mechanisms underlining curriculum making practices: modes of reflexivity; national and organizational context; and relational goods and evils that emerge from the networks. To summarise each of these mechanisms briefly, a dynamic understanding of the modes of reflexivity is necessary to explain the distinctive ways of teachers’ actions. National and organizational context has a strong potential to shape the structure and culture of teachers’ networks and influence how teachers transfer the ideas offered from the networks. Relational goods indicate, for example, the existence of collegial trust, emotional support, and a sense of community, whereas relational evils refer to the absence of relational goods, conflicting ideas and negative connections perceived in the network. Although this research highlights the importance of the relational dimension of curriculum making and offers a conceptual and analytical framework to understand teachers’ social practices, there is a need for further research to investigate how subject background, social networks at the school level and previous experience with curricular work and professional life stories may contribute our understanding of curriculum making as social and relational practice.

Archer, M. (2007). Making our Way through the World. Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellotti, E. (2015). Qualitative networks: Mixed methods in sociological research. Abingdon: Routledge. Danermark, B., Ekström, M., Jakobsen, L., & Karlsson, J. (2002). Explaining Society: Critical Realism in Social Sciences.