Interpreting Why Teachers Resist Curriculum Reform From Cultural Perspective

Any curriculum change should be based on the support of culture, and culture is the basis for curriculum change. However, in our country, the technological reason is often regarded as the key idea to the new curriculum reform in the implementation process, which believes that the implementation of curriculum reform will be successful as long as the plans are faithful enough to it. In this situation, people neglected the basic role of culture, which led teachers to resist the curriculum reform. Teacher is the key factor in the process of implementing curriculum reform, because any curriculum reform will be eventually carry out through teachers' teaching. Therefore, analyzing why teachers resist curriculum reform has a very important significance.The thesis was based on the cultural perspective, using document anylysis, historical method, factor analysis and comparison method to explore the issue. First of all, the author analyzed the nature of educational change form the perspective of culture. In the cultural perspective, the nature of educational change is the culture change. The process of educational change is the collision and blending process between different cultures. Accordingly, the author analyzed new curriculum reform demond for what kind of culture, and found that the new curriculum contained plentiful cultural ideas, such as people-oriented, combining scientific spirit with humanistic spirit, backing education to life world and so on, which all made many new requirements on the traditional teacher culture and launched huge challenges to traditional teacher culture. So the extent of culture shock which teachers have been keen on is unprecedented. In view of this, the author analyzed the reason why teachers resist curriculum reform from the perspective of organizational culture and teacher culture. The main points are as follows:From the perspective of organizational culture, the school is as an organization, whose main function of culture is maintaining stability, reducing anxiety, while changes are usually destabilizing, and increasing insecurity of teachers. When the teachers feel that curriculum change makes them to give up the stability and the sense of security, they will be unwilling and even to resist change; Moreover, the organizational culture whether it is strong or weak, which will be the conservative force for teachers' resisting change. From the perspective of teacher culture, the new curriculum demands of a new type of teacher culture in the both of form and content. In the form of teacher culture, the new curriculum demands of cooperative teacher culture; while in the content, it demands of dialogue, democracy and open teacher culture.The characteristic of the form of traditional teacher culture individualism. It contains some features, such as adoring teacher authority, conservative values, the value orientation of official position, and an agent of social stratification. Therefore, the teacher culture advocated by the new curriculum is opposed to the traditional teacher culture in the both of form and content. Those conflicts and oppsitions led teachers to resist curriculum reform.In conclusion, the functions for the inherent conservative, maintaining stability and reducing anxiety of the culture, and the conflicts between old and new teacher cultures are the real reasons why teachers resisting curriculum reform. Accordingly, the author believed that the only way to reverse the situation of teachers' resistance to curriculum change is to change the traditional teacher culture and to make teachers participate in curriculum reforms actively, which can ensure the smoothful implementation of curriculum reform.