Temporal Dissonance, Contextual Confusion and Risk: Learning from the Experiences of Teachers Living with Curriculum Change

This chapter considers the main messages emerging from the teachers’ stories and how these help to explain the very limited success of the English teaching curriculum initiatives in most of the countries included. We see evidence of temporal dissonance between the concepts of teaching and learning and recommended teaching approaches introduced by English curricula, and those prevailing more widely within the existing educational culture; . Such dissonance, and other commonly mentioned factors, contributes to the state of contextual confusion evident in most of the stories, which in turn makes curriculum implementation professionally and personally risky for teachers.