Assumptions and implications of adopting educational ideas from the West The case of student-centered pedagogy in Turkey

This chapter seeks to analyse how student-centred pedagogy (SCP) was adopted in Turkey at the turn of the century. The chapter particularly looks at how primary school teachers viewed adoption of SCP as a Western pedagogical approach, the extent to which their voice was incorporated in this process, and how they welcomed or resisted SCP in enactment process. By doing so, the chapter responds to calls for looking at local agencies that indigenize educational imports. The findings of the study show that SCP was welcomed as a ‘Western best practice’ by the majority of teachers; however, they modified it considerably in accordance with classroom realities and contextual factors. Furthermore, a high number of teachers demonstrated resistance to specific aspects of SCP due to convictions that SCP marginalised knowledge acquisition, and favoured students with higher socio-economic background, inadvertently intensifying social inequalities. These findings point to ‘loose couplings’ between imported global education policies and their local implementation. The study highlights the importance of including teachers’ voice in different stages of policy transfer, as reform efforts that are not internalized and embraced by teachers would have limited success in initiating sustainable change.