Page 158 - Getting of the fence
P. 158

                                Chapter 6
 mainly concerned whether the Comprehensive Approach was primarily new PCK (accommodation) or whether it primarily confirmed current teaching practice providing teachers with a common language through which they were able to explain the how, what, and why of their curriculum (assimilation). In terms of the matrix of Luttenberg et al. (2013), the extent to which the Comprehensive Approach led to a transformed own frame of reference or an adaptation of the Comprehensive Approach to fit the teachers’ frame of reference varied between the teachers.
Ysabel and Caitlin can be regarded as two examples for respectively accommodation (adapting one’s own frame of reference to fit the initial intent of the reform) and assimilation (adapting the initial intent of the reform to fit one’s own frame of reference). Ysabel adapted her own frame of reference to fit the initial intent of the Comprehensive Approach (accommodation). For her, the relevance of the Comprehensive Approach was primarily as an eye-opener, which triggered her to consciously teach the literary texts through all four approaches thereby aiming to link the approaches to each other and to the texts. While being cautious of causality, Ysabel’s transformed own frame of reference could possibly be an explanation of the transformation with regard to the time spent on the four approaches: her average deviation from the assumed even distribution was 19% in year 1 and 7% in year 2. Caitlin, on the other hand, adapted the Comprehensive Approach to fit her own frame of reference (assimilation). For her the relevance of the Comprehensive Approach centred on legitimizing her existing EFL literature teaching and being able to frame it. It provided her with a language through which she could now explain her intentions with the literature curriculum. It is perhaps therefore not surprising that the difference between the time spent on the four approaches when comparing year 1 and year 2 for Caitlin was minimal: her average deviation from the assumed even distribution was 17% in year 1 and 16 % in year 2. Such a difference between teachers is in line with Luttenberg et al. (2013) who argue that “reforms may be hard to predict or steer not because teachers are unwilling rather because of their search for coherence between the demands of a reform in relation to their own frames of reference” (p. 290).
Although in the previous paragraph we provided a description of two example cases of accommodation and assimilation with a possible connection between the act of sensemaking and the changes in how literary texts were approached, these cases are, however, not representative of the entire group. Take for example Liz, for whom the Comprehensive Approach provided a clear structure for her
156






























































































   156   157   158   159   160