Fang, Yanping

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to report on how a grade level team in a Singapore primary school used lesson study to mediate the implementation of the English language national curriculum. It aims to explore how this process had mobilised different teachers’ knowledge, challenged their beliefs of teaching and student learning, and created impact on their learning and knowledge.

Design/methodology/approach
An interpretive qualitative study using a case study methodology was employed. Data collected included participant observations and individual interviews. Transcripts of lesson study discussions were open coded for the content of teacher discourse and the sources of influences on the teachers’ reasoning and action.

Findings
The findings indicate that each stage of the lesson process engaged teachers’ deliberative discourse differently and constituted their building a common inquiry stance into the problem of student learning in reading and writing, moving away from a lesson-based view to embracing a curriculum-based deliberation, and challenging their shared assumptions and enabling their learning to adopt the students’ lens in improving the research lesson.

Originality/value
This study provides an illustrative case on how teachers’ talk about work practices in lesson study mediated teacher learning in a group context. The study established the importance of an interconnected view of teacher interaction in lesson study that factored in the consideration of the influences at the teachers’ level and at the school’s level that enabled and/ or impeded a broader consideration of practice and richer conditions for the mentoring of novice teachers in the team.

Purpose This study aims to search for fitting lenses to view and interpret teacher learning in a Japanese secondary school teacher staffroom and capture the reconstituting of researcher subjectivities in this process.

Design/Approach/Methods A narrative approach chronically documents the findings and use of the lenses in analyzing the staffroom daily interactions and traces the journey of transformation in our researcher subjectivities.

Findings The telling of a Japanese staffroom (shokuinshitsu) as a thrice-told tale under the three lenses—cultural-historic activity theory, contextualism, and intimacy orientation—each uncovers a unique interpretation of the learning going on in the daily life of the Japanese staffroom. While complementary, Western-lenses are found to be unable to explain the nature of the everyday practices in the staffroom formed under the worldviews and ethics of East Asia. Our critical examination of the major academic encounters involved in the past two decades illuminates the complex dynamism behind our research perspectives, awakens us to the dominance of Western-centralism in our researcher subjectivities, transforms our worldviews, and returns us to our cultural roots to build alternative frames of reference as East Asia as Method.

Originality/Value This study not only uniquely demonstrates what decentered, alternative, and diversified frames of reference would look like in studying East Asian practices but also what it would take for scholars to move toward East Asia as Method. Additionally, going beyond the three lenses, it contributes to our understanding of how space (staffroom as an entity) mediates forming of the character of those who are dwellers of the shokuinshitsu.