ABSTRACT
In the 21st century context, the Philippine education system is buffeted by global movements on the one hand and local, contextualized reactions on the other. The global Education For All (EFA) movement has become a key linchpin of Philippine education policy. It is a global normative formula designed to accomplish the fundamental common good of education. The Philippine Basic Education Sector Reform Agenda (BESRA) is the localized and contextualized response to EFA. Teachers have discovered that the oftentimes-opposing forces of EFA and BESRA have placed them in what Appadurai describes as fundamental disjunctures where their localized educational practices clash with global and purportedly new innovations.
This chapter argues that teachers who find themselves in these disjunctures caused by the intersection of global and local policies and practices undergo sense-making experiences moderated by their sociocultural interactions. In this chapter, the sense-making encounters of school stakeholders implementing teacher education policies, represented by narratives, are viewed from the perspectives of identity, agency, and ownership. Identity formation emerges as one of the fundamental reactions to these experiences. This chapter posits that as these school stakeholders navigate through various waves of disjunctures, they make choices that either empower them or disempower them. In a word, their sense-making experiences impact on their sense of agency. Aside from identity and sense of agency, this chapter also affirms that while attempting to make sense, school stakeholders also experience decisions impinging on their sense of ownership. These theoretical assumptions allow this chapter to contribute to current debates on how educational policies impact actors who position themselves in relation to ownership, sense-making, and agency.
