Early childhood teachers' relationship with the official curriculum: the mediating role of professional and policy contexts

In this paper, we explore how professional and policy contexts can mediate early childhood teachers' relationship with the official curriculum. Using their assessment practices as an impetus for discussion, we probed 28 Greek kindergarten teachers to talk about their engagement with the prescribed curriculum and explain how they construct its guidelines at the enactment level. As teachers discussed how they negotiated and adapted to curriculum guidelines on assessment, it emerged that their experiences can be better understood in the contexts within which they occurred. Three themes emerged regarding teachers' contexts: the way the curriculum change was introduced back in 2003, the role teachers' professional contexts played in teachers' effort to make sense of the new curriculum and the permissive policy context Greek kindergarten teachers operate in. The findings provide insight for policymakers, teacher professional development and research.