Early childhood teachers everyday meaning making and lived experiences in implementing the merdeka curriculum in marginal Indonesian contexts

Abstract

In Indonesia, the Merdeka Curriculum was introduced to promote pedagogical flexibility and strengthen teacher agency in educational practice. However, its implementation in Indonesia’s 3T regions (frontier, outermost, and underdeveloped areas) unfolds within structural constraints that remain insufficiently examined from teachers’ lived perspectives. This study investigates how early childhood education teachers experience and interpret the implementation of the Merdeka Curriculum in the 3T region of Timor Island, East Nusa Tenggara, with particular attention to processes of sensemaking, teacher agency, and the development of teacher resilience in marginal educational contexts. The study employed a qualitative design grounded in Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to examine teachers’ lived professional experiences. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews with 29 early childhood teachers who had direct experience implementing the curriculum in rural and marginal settings. The data were analysed iteratively through thematic and interpretative procedures to identify patterns of meaning across teachers’ narratives. The findings suggest that curriculum implementation in these contexts is not experienced as a technical enactment of policy, but as a reflective process of sensemaking through which teachers interpret and adapt curricular principles in response to socio-cultural realities, limited resources, and community expectations. Teacher agency emerges as situational and relational, shaped by interactions between teachers, local communities, and children’s everyday experiences rather than institutional resources alone. In addition, teacher resilience functions as a key professional capacity sustained through moral commitment, collegial relationships, and spirituality, enabling teachers to maintain pedagogical continuity despite structural constraints. These findings highlight that curriculum enactment in marginal contexts is shaped less by policy design than by teachers’ capacities for contextual interpretation, adaptive agency, and professional resilience.