Teacher employment has long attracted considerable policy and research attention, as different systems of selecting and employing them have been historically mobilised; such discussions have been re-ignited after the pandemic around the world and in Europe, as many countries faced severe teacher’ shortages. Teacher appointments in Cyprus public schools have been vehemently discussed in the public sphere for several decades, but, paradoxically, for different reasons: the large number of teacher candidates. This is due to the ‘Epetirida’ (Yearbook) system that was put in place in 1960 with Cyprus independence. The Yearbook listed candidate teachers in a chronological order, based on their graduation year and appointed them when it was their ‘turn’. The Yearbook has been criticized as undemocratic and unmeritocratic, with discussions prioritizing the qualification and expertise rather than the age of teachers as criterion for appointment in public education.  The Yearbook exponentially increased size because the public sector offered advantageous employment conditions and status. The Yearbook gradually became very (mainly for secondary school teachers) compared to state needs, resulting in candidates waiting for years to get appointed. The Yearbook was under negotiation for almost thirty-five years; indicatively, all presidents of Cyprus and thirteen Ministers of Education tried to deal with it (Casoulides, 2018).  It was thus a significant historical moment marked by heated debates, when the government passed a new law in 2015 labelled ‘New Appointment System in Education’ (NASE) which involved the gradual and over a decade discontinuation of the Yearbook in 2027 and the parallel introduction of a list comprised of teacher candidates who passed a written examination from 2017 onwards for all sectors and subject-areas of education. This examination has been taking place every two years and is comprised of separate written exams on specialization subject - areas, Greek Language competence and general didactic skills.  Primary school teachers are examined in the latter two as well as in special didactics of the official primary school curriculum in the subject – areas of Greek Language and Mathematics.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how primary school teachers realize the power of the state, through their participation in NASE, and how this power determines both their professionality and personal lives while amplifying the official curriculum as a regulatory mechanism (Doyle, 1992).  It is argued that NASE renders the official curriculum a key configuration tool of teachers as professionals, a process I theorize with Foucauldian notions of power, discipline, technology and technique.  NASE is thus theorized as a technology with two aspects: the anatomical one and the biological one (Foucault, 2011).  Foucault (2011) argued that the anatomical aspect is based on the body, referring to the training of the body to increase its abilities and its usefulness, which could lead the person to prosperity. In this way, the body is included effectively in an economic system (Foucault, 2011) and it can be weighed and measured (Foucault, 1989). The biological aspect of the technology of NASE can be described as population management and regulation, since it focuses on the bodies as species (Foucault, 2011).  People have to improve their lives and their health in order to live as long as it is possible. The biological aspect deals with the circumstances around who can differentiate births, mortality, health level (Foucault, 2011). I argue that NASE participants have to be disciplined in both the biological and the anatomical aspects of power in exchange of their appointment: NASE promises to ensure a quality life to the most disciplined and practiced bodies.   

The broader study examines how primary teachers, who participated in NASE, describe and realize its power. This paper focuses on how the Curriculum is narrated by primary teachers when they describe their participation in NASE processes, to understand how it is mobilized in re-configuring them as professionals. Theorizing curriculum as a technique embedded in the broader technology of power (NASE), teachers’ narrations of (at times repeated) experiences before, during and after NASE exams are analyzed to interpret how the NASE (and the official curriculum therein) produce’ teachers as particular types of professionals. This paper addresses the following questions: ‘How does curriculum emerge in teachers’ narrations of their experiences of NASE?’ and ‘How do primary school teachers realize the power of NASE and the Curriculum through their participation in the examination process of 2023?’. Data collection involved multiple NASE legal, policy and examination documents as well as two interviews with each of 20 candidates. The first interview took place by the end of the 2023 examination in December and asked participants to narrate all the previous rounds of examination they experienced (2017, 2019, 2021, 2023). The second interview was conducted immediately after the announcement of the examination results in March 2024, focused on teachers’ experiences during the waiting period between the exam results, as well as their understandings of what the announced results meant for their career future. Most of the participants were women, (the majority of primary teachers in Cyprus), while three were men. Some candidates took the 2023 examination for the first time, but some had taken the NASE exams in all or some previous rounds. The ages of the participants were between 22 and 42 years old. Most of the participants were working in private education. Two participants were working in public education on a yearly contract (after succeeding in a previous NASE round), while other participants were working (part time) in public schools as casual relief teachers. In this paper I focus only on the 15 participants who took part in the 2023 NASE exams. Data was analyzed through theoretically informed thematic and axial analysis. Firstly topics - the thematic categories – were created and later organized into central topics and sub-topics. The comparison of the topics led to their grouping in axes. In this paper I focus on topics and sub-topics which involved notions of curriculum within the NASE processes.

In policy and legal documents NASE was promoted with an ‘excellence’ rhetoric, invoked in meritocratic arguments to persuade the public: that the best among candidates would be selected. This was challenged by participants, who were not convinced that the exam content and the format adequately mapped teachers’ professional knowledge and practice. When teachers were invited to comment on curriculum in general, they provided multiple definitions. Some teachers referred to the curriculum as ‘theoretical’ and that it is teachers who transform it into practice as enactment; others construed it, as mainly a source of guidance on what and how to teach. Some teachers narrated curriculum as in constant change, not static. In some of the candidates mentioned their ability and responsibility to differentiate the curriculum to address their specific students’ needs. However, when it came to describing their preparation for the NASE exams, notions of curriculum became constricted to the official documents and state school textbooks, which were heavily studied by teachers to prepare for content and for special didactics of Greek Language and Mathematics. Other dominant definitions construed curriculum as academic content (knowledge) or ‘subject – matter’ in each subject - area, comprised of success and efficiency indicators. Such narrations provided proof of the power of the state. Candidate teachers, desiring to live ‘better’ by employment in public schools, are motivated positively by the power (Foucaul, 1989) and are disciplined in both anatomical and biological aspects of the technology of NASE as they follow a very specific set of regulations and curriculum succeed. They put them-selves and their knowledge under examination, making their bodies transparent and visible to an invisible power in exchange of their appointment (Foucault, 1989). In this process the official curriculum’s regulative role in the teaching profession is enhanced, emerging as a key condition of success in exams.

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