Heng, Tang Tang

Learner-centred educational approaches, like differentiated instruction (DI), have been gaining popularity worldwide through the process of educational borrowing. Teachers’ experiences with educational change are complicated when the educational ideas they encounter are transferred from abroad. This mixed method study examined how ten teachers in Singapore implemented and experienced DI, an educational approach from the USA. Findings revealed that when the destination conditions are more aligned with source conditions, Singapore teachers experience greater successes in their DI implementation, specifically in creating environments that support learning, building on quality curriculum, and leading and managing the classroom. When teachers faced cultural, technological, and political misalignments, they encountered greater obstacles, specifically, in using assessment and adapting instruction to student variances. Findings spell implications for greater synergy across educational change and borrowing work, including more criticality when borrowing educational ideas across countries and the need to foreground contextual peculiarities in both source and destination countries.

As transfers of educational ideas across countries accelerate in the twenty-first century with globalization, studies on educational change have lagged in foregrounding the importance of cross-national contexts when ideas traverse borders. This qualitative study investigates 30 Singapore teachers’ perceptions of challenges involved in implementing differentiated instruction from the U.S., to sketch the contours around the intersection of educational transfer and change. Through analyzing classroom discussions and assignments of teachers enrolled in a Masters-level differentiated instruction course, we found that teachers’ perceptions of implementation challenges clustered around technological, sociocultural, and political concerns. Challenges associated with differing technological conditions (e.g., class size/space and teacher capacity) and sociocultural norms (e.g., emphasis on control, results, and teacher-centered teaching) bring to fore how perceptions of origin and destination contexts shape reception of educational ideas, like differentiated instruction. Postmodern ambiguities around norms, objectivity, and evidence in a globally porous world further complicate teachers’ concerns. In concluding, we propose a comparative educational change framework through which educational change and transfer can be viewed and argue for the need to scrutinize the influence of cross-national contexts when studying educational change across borders.

The lived realities of agents involved in educational borrowing or transfer are often omitted as research and discussions reside predominantly at a macro level. Through the lens of a comparative educational change framework synthesising concepts in educational change and comparative education, this study examines the lived experiences of teachers in Singapore implementing differentiated instruction, a form of learner-centred education, borrowed from the U.S. Interviewing and observing teachers, we found that they experienced postmodern and political tensions around sociocultural expectations of teaching, learning, and learners. Simultaneously, they struggled with technological considerations like structural conditions in schools and insecurities around their competencies. These findings spell implications for how we support teachers involved in educational borrowing professionally, intellectually, and emotionally. Educational borrowing on the ground can benefit from the consideration of technological, sociocultural, political, and postmodern perspectives of educational change.