How primary school teachers experience education policy change in South Africa

Abstract

South Africa has been in a process of far-reaching restructuring and is still witnessing a plethora of many policies initiating and seeking educational change. Education policy for educational change only becomes reality once it is implemented at the micro-level, or at the classroom level. Teachers indeed are the key role players in this implementation phase and are, more often than not, the silent voices in the process, ignored and often iscounted at this stage of educational change. How they experience and understand the policy change or how the human side of policy change is contextualised, remains in South Africa a problem to be explored and explained in educational research. From an interpretive perspective, this article explains how teachers experience education policy change and how this might effect policy implementation.