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Innovative, more or less : a post-critical inquiry into Singapore teacher identity
Author
Lim, Tze Mien
Supervisor
McWilliam, Erica
Baildon, Mark
Abstract
This study examines the identity formation of the teacher at a time and place that valorises innovation, i.e. Singapore in the first decade of the 21st century. It seeks to understand how the self-formation of Singapore teachers is constituted through the call to innovativeness. This is done through inquiries into both ‘identity’ and ‘innovation’ as discursively constituted fields. The inquiries take a two-pronged approach – top-down and bottom up inquiries – which aim to understand the formation of the innovative teacher subject as a ‘problem of the present’. The first move is a top-down inquiry which entails an historicising move to examine the macro – political and institutional – discourses that ‘make up’ the innovative teacher subject through the decades since Singapore’s independence. The second move comprises a bottom-up or empirical investigation of teachers’ reasoning of innovation and its significance for them.
The study draws upon poststructuralist literature, in particular the work of Michel Foucault, to conceive of the subject, power and governmentality. An argument is made for proceeding with a coupling of the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ analytical approaches – a hybrid methodology – to generate accounts that are available to be read within and against each other (Lather, 1991). At the level of interpretation, Haraway’s ironic conceptualisation is used to organise and categorise data to surface the inherent paradoxes in the texts. Nikolas Rose’s (1991, 1996) applications of Foucault’s ideas underpin the analysis of the governance of modern teacher subjects, focusing on the responsibilisation of these subjects, i.e. how they ‘make-themselves-up’ as innovative through the technologies available to them.
Given that all historical accounts are necessarily incomplete, the ‘top-down’ investigation in this study does not claim to provide a definitive historicising of the making-up of the innovative Singapore teacher in present times. For the purpose of this study, the scope of the historicising account is limited to the years after Singapore’s independence from Malaya (1965) up to the present day. The complementary ‘bottom-up’ empirical investigation utilises interview scripts of teachers who had, in the previous year, taken part in a high priority innovation funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education and led by the National Institute of Education. The interview texts were analysed for the propositions that constituted teachers’ reasoning in relation to innovation as a professionalising imperative. In the spirit of Foucauldian analysis, both investigations have parity in creating a space for the emergence and resistance of once-silenced or unheard voices in the making up of the truth about innovative teacher identity.
The study draws upon poststructuralist literature, in particular the work of Michel Foucault, to conceive of the subject, power and governmentality. An argument is made for proceeding with a coupling of the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ analytical approaches – a hybrid methodology – to generate accounts that are available to be read within and against each other (Lather, 1991). At the level of interpretation, Haraway’s ironic conceptualisation is used to organise and categorise data to surface the inherent paradoxes in the texts. Nikolas Rose’s (1991, 1996) applications of Foucault’s ideas underpin the analysis of the governance of modern teacher subjects, focusing on the responsibilisation of these subjects, i.e. how they ‘make-themselves-up’ as innovative through the technologies available to them.
Given that all historical accounts are necessarily incomplete, the ‘top-down’ investigation in this study does not claim to provide a definitive historicising of the making-up of the innovative Singapore teacher in present times. For the purpose of this study, the scope of the historicising account is limited to the years after Singapore’s independence from Malaya (1965) up to the present day. The complementary ‘bottom-up’ empirical investigation utilises interview scripts of teachers who had, in the previous year, taken part in a high priority innovation funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education and led by the National Institute of Education. The interview texts were analysed for the propositions that constituted teachers’ reasoning in relation to innovation as a professionalising imperative. In the spirit of Foucauldian analysis, both investigations have parity in creating a space for the emergence and resistance of once-silenced or unheard voices in the making up of the truth about innovative teacher identity.
Date Issued
2012
Call Number
LB2840 Lim
Date Submitted
2012