CRPP - Conference Papers

In this paper, we examine some of the data from a 3-year study with students at a small, public middle school in New York City’s Chinatown. As part of a larger study of multiliteracies in a transdisciplinary curriculum (Albright, Purohit, & Walsh, under review), we undertook a project with 60 students to identify literacy practices in their lives—in and out of school. As the project progressed, we used data collected with students to decide on the next steps.

Building Communities of Readers among Teachers (BCR) project attempted to employ a teachersas- readers professional development framework to build participating Singaporean secondary English teachers’ capacities to teach literature. Teachers-as-readers projects are designed to promote teachers’ personal engagement with narrative as a prelude to reconceptualizing English their teaching, leading them to afford students with greater opportunities to explore literary texts in depth through extended talk, writing and other forms of representation. This paper elaborates the interrelated structural and attitudinal reasons why this framework had to be abandoned in favour of more a recognizable form of professional development in order to garner sufficient teacher support to work towards the projects’ goals. Singapore’s legacy of a pragmatic and technicist orientation to education hinders the adoption of such a reflexive form of professional learning.

This paper relates a crucial aspect of a two-year professional development innovation/research project proposed to improve Singapore‟s poorest performing grade 7 and 8 students‟ learning in English language, mathematics, and science as a consequence of their teachers‟ developing capacity to plan and teach. The instrument and process particularly designed as a pre and post innovation moderation exercise to find “articulations of understanding”, which served as evidence of change in pedagogy and learning is described. Its set of dimensions of understanding can be used to plan and assess for cognitive depth and engaged learning.