Teachers’ pedagogic practices: a case study of the enactment of the Nigerian upper basic Social Studies Curriculum.

Abstract

This study aims to answer the question: How is the Social Studies Education curriculum understood and implemented in the classroom? Empirically, this study is located within a specific case of Nigeria’s 2013 revised 9-Years Basic Education Curriculum (RBEC) reform, which replaced the 2008 9-Years Basic Education Curriculum (BEC). The study explores and analyses four teachers’ understanding of the purpose of Social Studies Education and describes the process of teachers’- interpretation and recontextualisation of Social Studies messages from the written curriculum to the classrooms. The conceptual framework for the study draws on Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse, extended with concepts from Barr et al.’s categorisation of the instructional purpose of Social Studies and Newmann et al.’s authentic intellectual work concepts. It is premised on the assumption that teachers will not seamlessly adopt all that the written curriculum requires of them as they enact Social Studies Education but will adapt the curriculum. The empirical work is a case study of the 9-Years RBEC Social Studies Education. Data were generated using a range of data collection methods that comprised the official curriculum documents, video recording of four consecutive lessons in each of the four upper basic nine classrooms, interviewing the Social Studies teachers and field notes. The study draws on the official curriculum documents, classroom observations, and interviews, to make sense of the assumptions about knowledge and pedagogy that underpin the official curriculum documents, teachers’ understanding of the official curriculum and teachers’ pedagogic practices. Analysing teachers’ pedagogic practices highlights a mismatch between the envisaged pedagogic prescription and the teachers’ practice. The underpinning principle of the RBEC is knowledge integration, and pedagogically the curriculum prescribes a mixed theory of instruction. In contrast, the teachers’ deep-seated belief is that knowledge is to be inculcated in the learners with no critical engagement, and traditional pedagogic practice still dominates the classrooms. The study contributes theoretical, methodological, and contextual insights into the issues under investigation, thereby contributing more nuanced ways of research within the field of curriculum implementation. Notably, the study provides a deeper engagement in making sense of teachers’ classroom practices in Nigeria by employing theory and concepts that helped refine broad categorisations of pedagogic style (teacher-centered or learner-centered approach) into dimensions of pedagogic classroom practices.