Teachers’ Cultural Ideology: Patterns of Curriculum and Teaching Culturally Valued Texts

Abstract

This study sought to reveal teachers’ personal cultural ideologies as reflected in their conceptions of the curriculum for, and in their actual teaching of, culturally valued texts. The concept “teachers’ personal cultural ideologies” refers to their value orientation toward the curricular and teaching contents relating to, in this particular case, teaching texts associated with their national group identity. The study is based on an investigation of 50 Israeli teachers of the Hebrew Bible working in ordinary public schools. It revealed six different patterns of teachers’ conceptions of the curriculum and teaching for this culturally valued text. Teachers displayed conflicting attitudes toward the expression of personal cultural ideology during the teaching process. Nonetheless, when describing what actually happened in their classrooms, they expressed teaching conceptions that were mostly congruent with their personal cultural ideologies. Although that these teachers taught the same obligatory national curriculum, with its defined cultural-ideological slant, their personal cultural ideologies did not necessarily mesh with the official ideological directions of the written curriculum. This study revealed that during the actual process of teaching, the teacher's personal cultural ideology became dominant, outweighing other types of teaching and curriculum ideology.