Teachers as ‘reform-doers’: developing a participatory curriculum to teach English as a foreign language

In this article I investigate the process of an in-service programme for English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teachers in Argentina started in 2007. Teachers began to feel uneasy about the EFL curriculum for secondary education at the time, feeling that something should be done to develop a participatory curriculum to be implemented in the future. The Ministry of Education approached me to develop a programme based on teachers’ concerns as they were initially willing to design in-service opportunities according to teachers’ suggestions. I organised my action-research-based programme into three sets of meetings: the first set for curriculum evaluation, the second set for learning about specific didactics, and the third set for developing a new curriculum with the hope it could be useful in the future. This teacher-developed curriculum is the basis of the 2012 EFL Curriculum as part of a new educational reform.