Teacher Agency and Differentiated Instruction in the Implementation of Indonesia’s Merdeka Curriculum
Keywords:
curriculum policy, differentiated instruction, educational accountability, Merdeka Curriculum, teacher agencyAbstract
The Merdeka Curriculum transfers substantial design authority to schools and teachers, making its success dependent on professional judgement rather than procedural compliance, yet implementation studies consistently report differentiated instruction that exists in documentation without corresponding classroom practice. This study aims to examine how the regulatory architecture of the curriculum constructs the role of the teacher, to identify the conditions that enable or constrain the exercise of professional agency, and to formulate the realignment required between accountability arrangements and the pedagogical model the curriculum presupposes. The research employs qualitative document analysis combined with a critical policy- analysis approach based on problem representation, examining national education standards, ministerial regulations on content, process and assessment, curriculum regulation, and the governing statutes, read against theories of differentiated instruction, formative assessment, and ecological teacher agency. The findings show that the regulatory corpus constructs the teacher simultaneously as a professional exercising diagnostic judgement and as an implementer subject to documentary accountability, and enforces the second construction far more stringently than it supports the first; that differentiation is consequently reduced to documentable material preparation rather than responsive adjustment grounded in formative evidence; and that agency is constrained across its iterative, practical-evaluative, and projective dimensions. The article recommends shifting supervision from planning documents to evidence of learning and teacher reasoning, genuine reduction of documentary burden defended against local reinstatement, reconstruction of professional development as sustained job-embedded support, and alignment of assessment architecture across educational levels.
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