Competing allegiances in ESL curriculum work

The ethnography reported here reports on the findings of a practitioner ethnography conducted in a feminised and casualised workforce over four years (1997-2001) in a New Zealand polytechnic. It examines the competing allegiances of teachers and students in a combined community and workplace English oriented programme, in contexts where intercultural, professional and hegemonic discourses underpin practice on the institutional margins. In all cases, English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers express a desire to retain autonomy to decide the form and nature of curriculum according to workable personal definitions and learner-centredness or needs. However, teacher discourses of learner needs do not always translate directly into the real world of student needs.