In recent years, many countries across the world have embarked on a quest to reinvent their national curricula, reflecting the global trend of policy-borrowing (Ball, 2016;  Sinnema and Aitken, 2013). While these curricula retain unique characteristics, there are a number of commonalities that these reforms have been shown to share, viz. the emphasis on 21^st century skills, student-centred learning, and a greater emphasis on pedagogical approaches that are believed to improve student performance and granting teachers a more devolved role in curriculum-making. This study will focus on this latter aspect of curriculum reform, specifically the effect of these reforms on teacher agency (Priestley & Biesta, 2013). 

The most recent major iteration of curriculum reform within the state of Georgia has been structured and implemented with a specific emphasis on these particular areas, which is an unprecedented occurrence in the history of education in this country (Silagadze, 2019; Li et al., 2019; Djakeli, 2019). Since Georgia is treading in uncharted waters with these changes, it remains uncertain as to the effects these structural shifts are having on the teaching profession and the extent to which they are fulfilling one of their stated objectives of enhancing teacher’s role in curriculum-making. This study aims to provide an in-depth evaluation of the ways in which the ongoing re-structurisation of the Georgian National Curriculum for Primary and Secondary schools enable or constrain teachers as curricular agents. 

The central research question the thesis intends to answer is the following: Do the recent changes in the Georgian National Curriculum enable or constrain teacher agency? 

The study also aims to answer the following subsidiary research questions: 

-       How does curriculum-making take place across different institutional sites in Georgia (from macro to nano)? 

-       How is teacher agency articulated in Georgia’s National Curriculum and associated texts? 

-       How do teachers perceive and exercise their agency in the classroom within the frames of the new National Curriculum?

-       Overall, do the recent changes in the Georgian National Curriculum enable or constrain teacher agency?

The study will draw upon the conceptual lens developed by Priestley and Philippou (2018, p. 154) that regards curriculum-making as a complex series of processes taking place across multiple sites that intersect and interact with one another in ‘unpredictable and context-specific ways’, often leading to differential practices and realities ‘wherein power flows in non-linear ways, thus blurring boundaries between these multiple sites.’ 

This will enable a systemic understanding of curriculum-making as dynamic interactions ranging from individual pupils and teachers (nano) to the international layer (supra). Further, this conceptual framework will enable an in-depth examination of how different actors interact across multiple sites with a particular focus on teachers as curriculum makers and therefore as agentic practitioners within the context of the new National Curriculum. The study will rely on the ecological model of teacher agency consisting of three core dimensions: Iterational, projective and practical-evaluative (Biesta et al. 2015). The three-dimensional model will facilitate an understanding of how teacher agency is enabled and/or constrained by cultural, structural and material sources available in multiple sites of curriculum-making in Georgia. Further, the ecological approach to teacher agency will enable to explore how teachers interpret and execute the new curriculum in ways that may contradict policy goals, and if such actions result in a discrepancy between intended and actual outcomes, as well as unforeseen consequences.

The study will mobilise and combine an analysis of texts ranging from the National Curriculum texts and associated documents focusing on the purposes and strategies of curriculum reform. The study will also utilise the data generated in situ through participant observations and in-depth interviews with teachers, policymakers and other stakeholders. The study will be conducted in two phases. In Phase I, the National Curriculum documents and associated texts will be analysed, including political speeches, white papers, the Ministry of Education and Science (MoES) website and education policy and strategy documents. In Phase II, the study will rely on ethnographic fieldwork that will combine detailed observations of school daily life in a number of schools with in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews with key actors across macro, meso, micro and nano sites including teachers, heads of department, school principals, curriculum counsellors, curriculum coordinators, and MoES representatives. This will help capture a multidimensional picture of how teachers are negotiating and mediating the new curriculum paradigm within school contextual dynamics, and consequently analyse the emergent recontextualisations, interpretations and enactments of the curriculum policy (Ball and Goodson, 2002; Lopes and Tura, 2019; Connelly and Clandinin, 1988; Rosiek and Clandinin, 2019). Further, it is believed that the ethnographic approach will yield comprehensive and contextualised descriptions of patterns and themes in teachers’ social practices, while also capturing the variability, uniqueness and creativity to generate valuable insights into the ways in which teachers enact and experience the reinvented curriculum. Fairclough’s (1992) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) will be used to deconstruct the discourse employed in policy documents to promulgate the reforms, and determine the extent to which the reform either enables or corrodes teacher agency.

For the first time in the context of Georgia, this study will lay the foundations for the process of understanding curriculum-making as a series of interlocking social practices that involve multiple actors across institutional sites. The ethnographic investigation will generate holistic social accounts and rich qualitative evidence with regard to how different actors navigate the reformed curriculum and whether the degree of agency afforded to teachers by the official discourse is at the same time constrained by the availability of resources, structural and contextual factors. The study will rely on these findings to provide evidence-informed recommendations towards streamlining the process of curriculum-making and supporting teacher agency. The study will also draw on the rich experience of other countries and the unique contextual factors in Georgia to recommend possible ways forward to avoid the pitfalls elucidated by international experience. This study will contribute to the growing research into teacher agency and curriculum-making. One of the notable contributions in this field include the recent work by Priestley et al. (2021) that provides a distillation of research about new forms of curriculum policy across a number of European countries. This study intends to add Georgia to the list of the countries where curriculum-making has been explored and the foundations for further research have been established. Qualitative evidence generated by the research will offer policymakers an understanding of the implications of the policies generated at supra, macro and meso layers for those who enact them at micro and nano layers (schools/classrooms). It is hoped that the study will also enable Georgian teachers to develop into more reflexive practitioners and become more conscious of their professional working practices. At the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in August, 2023, the first phase of a policy analysis will be presented, which will include initial findings.

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