Indonesia, like many countries around the world, has been engaged in the effort to improve its teacher quality as the main strategy to elevate the whole educational quality. This dissertation seeks to understand how Indonesian teacher educators make sense of the new teacher certification policy as they are engaged in its implementation. Few scholars have conducted studies that are published in English related to the implementation process of large-scale education reform in Indonesia, including in the implementation of the teacher certification policy, and this study intends to fill this gap. Moreover, teacher educators are, arguably, key implementing agents in many teacher reforms, not only in Indonesia, but also around the world. Surprisingly, there has been little research examining teacher educators in global teacher reforms, and this study intends to fill in that gap as well.This study uses an integrative sense-making framework proposed by Spillane, Reiser, and Reimer (2002). The framework’s main argument is: “What a policy means for implementing agents is constituted in the interaction of their existing cognitive structures (including knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes), their situation, and the policy signals” (Spillane, Reiser, et al., 2002, p. 388). This integrative framework has three core elements: individual sense-making, social sense-making, and policy signals and representations. I used a multisite qualitative case study approach. As the principal method of data collection, I used interviews with various policy actors: 29 teacher educators and 11 ministry officials. I also supplemented the interview data with document analysis and observation data. In analyzing my data, I relied on data displays. I created role-ordered matrices to display the full data set at once to allow for comparisons of different groups of participants to notice similarities and differences among different roles, as well as patterns, themes, or trends within and across roles and institutions, and to seek for plausibility. I found that the participating teacher educators had competing logics in their sense-making as they implemented the teacher certification policy. These logics, one focused on individual sense-making and the other focused on social sense-making, were arguably contested and negotiated through a range of legitimacy mechanisms: normative, constitutive, and regulative. The logic related to the social sense-making, the civil service norms, seemed to be the more dominant one, and as a result, the Indonesian teacher educators produced the behaviors that were in line with these norms. They seemed to focus on rules, procedures and regulations, demonstrated compliance and obedience towards the instructions and guidelines, and did not put a strong emphasis on the importance of expertise. These obedient and compliant behaviors have resulted in the relative success of the policy implementation as indicated by the massive number of certified teachers every year (more than 200,000 teachers per year). This study highlights several implications. First, it considers the influence and potential tradeoffs of the civil service norms in education policy implementation in Indonesian context. Second, for a more global context, this study discusses the implications of a sense-making approach in educational policy implementation, including putting learning at the center of policy implementation. Finally, this study cautions the pursuit of bold reform ideas, not only because those ideas – as helpful and well intentioned as they are – can be damaging, but the complexity of human sense-making will also make learning those ideas very challenging for policy implementing agents.
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