Teachers’ professional judgement when recontextualising Indonesia’s official curriculum to their contexts

This paper examines how a new policy was enacted by teachers with different working conditions in Indonesia. The concept of curriculum enactment and an elaborated theoretical perspective for understanding teachers’ professional judgement are presented to reveal whether teachers from different school sectors encounter dilemmas in curriculum reform and whether they display consistency in their patterns of resolving those dilemmas. The data reported in this study were obtained from transcripts of interviews and fieldnotes of classroom observations with nine teachers from state and private secondary schools in Indonesia. The results suggest that the two groups of teachers experienced different dilemmas and developed different resolutions. The paper concludes that the resolutions adopted by teachers reflected their attempts to ‘act for the best’. KEYWORDS: Curriculum enactment, curriculum reform, dilemmatic space, recontextualisation, professional judgemen