The interrelationship between a teacher’s worldview, personal beliefs, and the delivery of the Personal, Social and Community Health Strand of the Western Australian Health and Physical Education Curriculum, within secondary schools.
Abstract
Western Australia’s education system has been undergoing major reform in the past five years due to the recent development of the Australian Curriculum, and Western Australian K-10 Syllabus (SCSA, 2016). The focus of this study was the worldview and personal beliefs of Western Australian (WA) health teachers and how these beliefs and views affected their delivery of the personal, social and community health (PSCH) strand of the Health and Physical Education (HPE) Western Australian Curriculum (WAC).
International and Australian researchers have reported links between teachers’ belief systems, their broader worldview, and their professional pedagogical practices. This is of particular interest during the implementation phase of curriculum reform, because teachers are adapting their pedagogical practices and designing new teaching programs (Lynch, 2014). In Western Australia teachers have been adjusting to teaching a curriculum written from a sociocultural perspective, which is a paradigm shift from the medico-scientific and biophysical approaches of the previous health education curriculums used in WA.
Previous researchers have found that teachers have expressed feelings of frustration, nervousness, and of being overwhelmed when implementing a new curriculum, in particular when the curriculum is innovative and not consistent with their own worldview. It has also been reported in recent Australian literature that the presence of the five propositions in the Australian HPE curriculum are conceptually challenging and have the potential to make teachers apprehensive (Lambert, 2018). Little research exists about this phenomenon with Western Australian teachers. I propose that my research offers timely insight into the relationship between teacher belief, worldview, and curriculum implementation.
I selected a constructivist grounded theory qualitative research methodology, and semi structured interviews were the method used to gather data about the experiences and perceptions of WA health teachers during the implementation phase of the WAC. A grounded theory qualitative approach was chosen for my study because it was concerned with investigating perspectives and drawing out themes to inform a theory and consequent theoretical framework. The aim of the study was to understand the basic social processes undertaken by teachers when implementing the HPE curriculum, such that occurs during curriculum reform.