ABSTRACT
The new moral education subject entails three new substantive requirements: the drawing up of an annual syllabus plan at each school, the use of an approved textbook for each lesson, and assessment for each student. Despite scepticism toward the rationale of the reform, education practitioners valued moral education, had accumulated expertise, and built standard moral education lessons. Moreover, many textbooks were developed from coursebooks already in use. Nonetheless, teachers at local sites needed to make sense of the new moral education policy to decide what course of action was necessary. This chapter begins to examine the complex enactment of reform prospectively as the policy trajectory reached the school in the years leading up to 2018/19 and through the first years of its implementation. Drawing mainly on interviews, observations at meetings, and internal school documents, it focuses on the negotiation of content in syllabus and lesson planning. In particular, it discusses how contents and broad lesson plans are determined, which content was adopted in the fieldwork schools and why, the extent to which teachers follow the annual syllabus plan and texts, and the extent of creativity that teachers exercise over lesson planning. Responding to variation in participant responses, the analysis explores heterogeneity in the teachers’ orientations to moral education, revealing a range of approaches to policy work in the school organization.
