Jiang Heng

The urgency of teaching diverse learners is aptly demonstrated in many parts of the world as the ethnic, racial, class, and linguistic diversity grows rapidly. Such diversity not only brings about opportunities for creative teaching, but also challenges for ensuring educational equity and providing high-quality teaching for all students from diverse backgrounds, especially those presently underserved by the educational system (Buehl, & Beck, 2014; Civitillo, Juang, & Schachner, 2018). Researchers have found that teachers prepared for working with students from diverse cultural backgrounds need to embrace beliefs that recognize the strengths of cultural diversity (Anagnostopoulos, 2006; Banks et al., 2005; Fives & Buehl, 2014; Gay, 2010). Thus, exploring and challenging teachers’ beliefs about cultural diversity should constitute a major objective in teacher professional learning. However, only a few studies have examined how in-service teachers’ beliefs are enacted and shaped in professional learning community practices (Little, 2003; Tam, 2015; Turner, 2011), and focused even less on teachers’ beliefs about cultural diversity (Pang, 2005; Sleeter, 1992). There are a few studies examining teachers’ cultural beliefs about diversity in Singapore, and found that Singaporean teachers are influenced by prevailing political ideologies, and have ambiguous perceptions towards students from less advantaged backgrounds (Anderson, 2015; Alviar-Martin & Ho, 2011; Dixon & Liang, 2009; Ho & Alviar-Martin, 2010; Ho et al., 2014; Lim & Tan, 2018). However, these studies discussed teachers’ individual perceptions of disadvantaged learners without further exploring how these perceptions are mediated by influences from professional development practices, where teachers’ cultural beliefs about diversity issues are in (inter)action as ideas emerge, clash, change, and (dis)agree with each other when teachers work together.

This case study describes for one rural school in China how pre-service teachers perceived their rural students and how they learned to focus on the test-related activities through the collaborative work with their intern colleagues and mentors. As this study explains, pre-service teachers learned from their mentors and support each other in learning to teach. I find that such professional collaboration sometimes promote teachers learning how to work with lower achieving students more effectively and offer them more cognitively demanding knowledge. This is referred to as “teaching through assessment”. Yet, some pre-service teachers in this study support each other in becoming more skilled in “teaching for assessment”, as well as in explicitly distinguishing between higher achieving and lower achieving students.

This qualitative study seeks to establish a deeper understanding of how and what teachers and teacher educators learn collaboratively during the lesson study process in a Singapore primary school. We used the boundary theories to conceptualize this learning process and delineate the learning mechanisms to foster mutual learning between the teacher educators and teachers in the case school. It was found that the teachers’ practical concerns and the improvement proposals from the teacher educators were constantly being negotiated considering the perceived and received consequences, which drove the boundary actions that include both boundary making and boundary crossing to form a learning space for the participants. Findings from this study provide a practical perspective that explains the complexities, challenges, and possibilities of implementing lesson study and working with boundaries to support teacher professional learning.