Pixel International Conferences

Post-independence era in 1962, ‘education and training of citizens in Algeria has become a consistently high priority for the government. As a result, the country lived a series of different education reforms’. (Gherzouli, 2019, p.1) the core of the last reform Second Generation is the implementation of values. Values according to Sagiv and Roccas (2017), are ‘cognitive representations of basic motivations. They are abstract, desirable goals, relatively stable over time and across situations’ (p.3). According to the ministry, the values, to a certain extent, shape the new curriculum, but whether or not it is the case of real-life classrooms, was not highly regarded. According to existing literature, the assertion of the learner’s national identity, in three different dimensions; “National conscience, Citizenship and Openness to the world” besides considering the cross curricular competencies are key values in achieving successful curricular reform (the official bulletin, 2016) In the case of Algeria, although resorting to these values to comply with high international educational system, these latter were not fully and clearly addressed in none of previous reforms. My research project sets out to study the nature and existence of these values through approaching middle school teachers’ understandings and awareness of these values. My research project will investigate the nature and the place of these values in the new English middle school curriculum and that is what I will be explaining in details during the presentation. My research targets middle school teachers’ voices and, more specifically, within the teaching of English as a foreign language (EFL). It further sets out to explore whether the education actors share the same view and understanding of values with the stakeholders, and how EFL middle school teachers deal with and enact these values.  It also aims to find out teachers' understanding of the values underpinning the second-generation curriculum, whether or not they have a role in deciding/directing these values and how they deal with them, possibly if they agree with these values, and finally what sort of difficulties (if any) they face when seeking to enact these values. My presentation will tackle some contextual background of middle school structure and curriculum content in Algeria, some literature on curriculum innovation and reforms, curriculum policy, second generation curriculum, curriculum and values. Moreover, this research plans to understand teachers understanding from an interpretivist/ constructivist point of view. Thus far, it follows a qualitative research strategy with the implementation of policy documents analysis, web-based questionnaire along with semi-structured interviews. In term of fieldwork, this project follows a pre-set qualitative research methodology that will be implemented for contributing to future Algerian school reforms to comply with a globalized educational system.

Keywords: values in teaching, curriculum innovation and reform, EFL, language teaching.

References:

• Gherzouli, I. (2019). Towards a Democratic Algerian Curriculum Development through Secondary School EFL Teachers’ Involvement. International Journal of Curriculum and Instruction, 11(1), 1-22.
• Sagiv, L., & Roccas, S. (2017). What personal values are and what they are not: Taking a cross-cultural perspective. In Values and behavior (pp. 3-13). Springer, Cham.
• The Official Bullitin. (2016)