Issues of Teaching & Learning in South Africa: A disjunction between curriculum policy and implementation

This article examines how issues of teaching and learning have been implemented in South African classrooms. We apply a framework of curriculum implementation (Rogan & Grayson, 2003) to studies of classroom teaching and learning reported in the literature. In doing so, we use the framework to categorise and comment on the research studies and determine the applicability of the framework to science and mathematics classrooms. Our review findings show that the framework's constructs of ‘profile of implementation’ and ‘capacity to innovate’ can be applied, with some adaptation, to both mathematics and science classroom studies. Fewer studies have involved the third construct ‘outside support’. We conclude that there is an inevitable dislocation between policy and curriculum implementation, and that the framework provides a useful notion of ‘feasible implementation’ by suggesting how (in a series of small steps) individual schools can put into practice new curriculum policy.