Building teachers' creative capabilities in Singapore's English classrooms

Kwek, D., Albright, J., & Kramer-Dahl, A. (2007). Building teachers' creative capabilities in Singapore's English classrooms: a way of contesting pedagogical instrumentality. Literacy, 41(2), 71-78. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9345.2007.00460.x

Background

To see creativity and criticality as interconnecting with transformative practices was to acknowledge that learners (teachers and students) first require access to socially available resources for shared meaning making. For teachers to help students to gain access to creative and critical reading practices, which is predominantly the work of English teachers, professional learning and development must focus on the teachers’ own reading practices, conceptions of creativity, and reading pedagogy.

Aims

This paper presented a pedagogical intervention project, entitled ‘Building Communities of Readers among Teachers’ that sought to develop teachers’ capacity to design curriculum and pedagogy, focussing on textuality and the students’ response. Through the teachers’ enhanced textual capacity, the project aimed to improve student performance and engagement.

Sample

The participants were 26 teachers teaching English and Literature at lower secondary level in two secondary schools. Method For stage one of the project, classroom observations focussing on the enacted curriculum and the teachers’ uses of texts were conducted. Data included classroom audio recordings, field notes and semi-structured interviews on the teachers’ reading habits, teaching practices and their perceptions on reading. The second stage comprised a series of reading circles for the teachers where they read a variety of texts and then met up bi-weekly for two hours to discuss what they had read.

Findings

The classroom observations indicated that the dominant pedagogy in the classrooms was that of direct instruction and teacher dominated talk. The teachers tended to disregard intellectually stimulating tasks in the classrooms, and focussed primarily on student-produced work. They also appeared to lack the competence to enact a curriculum that was developmentally coherent and responsive to their students’ needs. The interview data also suggested the following patterns common among the teachers: low expectations of their students’ reading practices; deficit discourses that influenced their teaching practices and beliefs about their own students; lack of reading for the teachers themselves; and the teachers finding their heavy workload impinging on their own reading time. However, they strongly believed that reading was critical in improving their students’ English language competency, and they recognized the need for the reading curriculum and classroom interactions to be more integrated with their students’ out-of-school textual experiences.

Implications

The authors believed that foregrounding participants’ reading practices and the possibilities of meaning as early as possible would help teachers re-imagine their reading pedagogies, and eventually challenge their current authoritative teaching practices.

Original article retrieved from EBSCOHost.