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mong the great deal of effort being invested in improving the quality of national education has been the continuous alteration of the national curriculum.

Indeed, attention has long been riveted on issues of curriculum overhaul and of how it can be realized and implemented in the classroom settings.

Curricula have been amended many times to suit the zeitgeist and pedagogical needs of both students and teachers, yet controversies surrounding the change remain unabated, leaving school teachers at sixes and sevens.

The unrelenting public outcry over the shift in curricular orientation indicates that the change lacks a clear philosophical outlook and academic rationale to underlie it. Also, the process of curriculum change has been notoriously conducted in a top-down fashion, summarily dismissing insights from the ground-up. As such, teachers'€™ experiences and beliefs were never soaked up and valued as having direct bearings on the curriculum change.

In essence, every attempt to revamp the curriculum falls short of clear directions from the socio-political aspects from which teaching practices or activities get shaped and reshaped. It is this sheer neglect of the social situation that makes even the finest and up-to-date curricula vitiated and not viable in application.

Now that the globally connected world has ushered pedagogical practices into an arena that demands professionalization on the part of individual teachers, it is high time for the government to take heed of and focus on teacher development and professionalization.

At the outset, it is important to note that teacher development has not become the locus of the government'€™s strategic plans in its effort to boost quality education.

Teachers have long been treated as passive recipients or executors of agendas or policies imposed by the government. Their roles as creative knowledge-makers built through years of teaching experiences and engagements with students seem to have not been sufficiently elevated and valued.

Furthermore, while the idea of professionalizing teachers has been repeatedly articulated in the public, the way teachers are professionalized is done in a product-oriented manner. The mandated competency test, for instance, compels teachers to exhibit their knowledge and understanding about pedagogy, but fails to measure their intuitive and creative mastery and competence in teaching.

By the same tokens, state-sponsored teacher-training known locally as the PLPG offered something prescriptive and normative and was not directed to challenge the status quo in a reflective and critical manner.

Professional knowledge understood in a product-oriented way belies the real truths of teachers as active transformative agents of change. What'€™s more, such an understanding relegates teacher'€™s identity, experiences, wisdom and beliefs inherent in them as they enter and engage in the profession.

We need, therefore, to envisage a model or reference of teacher development and professionalization that puts more emphasis on the process than on the product. In this regard, a socio-cultural perspective can offer a rich insight into how teachers develop their own pedagogy without sacrificing their identity and beliefs.

The most viable and effective strategy would be to prepare and encourage teachers to become teacher-researchers. As their teaching practice takes place in a specific site (i.e. the classroom), teachers need to be made aware that the focus of the research should be contextualized and situated in the phenomenon in classroom settings, hence the term classroom action research.

Different from the banal teacher-training always conducted where teachers are to digest and to swallow pre-given knowledge and teaching materials offered to them, preparing teachers to be classroom teacher-researchers would take a radical approach whereby they are encouraged to invent their own pedagogy bottom-up, instead of implementing norms that have been officiated through legislation.

Through their research they are also expected to be able to construct and eventually assess their pedagogy by virtue of their constant engagements with students and even to resist the existing one.

No less important, through reflective inquiry as a key method in classroom action research, teachers can develop their critical awareness that pedagogical knowledge is always dynamic, protean and adaptive to the changing contexts and to students'€™ variable needs.

In the context of global competitiveness, education, without doubt, plays a vital role in enhancing quality human resources and this can be made possible only by creating a policy that centers more on teacher development and professionalization than on guiding pedagogical principles that are abstract and insensitive toward particular teaching contexts.