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Struggling against pedagogical instrumentality: Attempting to awaken the literary imagination in Singapore’s secondary English classrooms
Citation
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, 2008.
Abstract
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.
Date Issued
March 2008
Project
CRP 8/06 JA