Kwek, Dennis Beng Kiat

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.

In broad terms, the central objective of the National Institute of Education (NIE) Core Research Programme is to provide empirical answers to persistent questions about the instructional logic and intellectual quality of teaching and learning across Singapore classrooms. In Core 1 (2004-2007), lessons and surveys from English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies and Mother Tongue classrooms at Primary 5 and Secondary 3 levels were collected. In Core 2 (2009-2014), three Panels were formed and organized along pedagogical beliefs and practices (Panel 2), classroom practices (Panel 3) and assessment practices (Panel 5) (Hogan, Towndrow, Kwek, & Chan, 2013). Both the Core 1 and 2 Research Programmes made important advancements in our understanding of a broad range of pedagogical practices through rigorous research designs and instrumentation. In addition, they had a significant impact on educational policy and research. The Core Research Programme continues to investigate what makes the Singapore education system successful, and what systemic pedagogical innovations are required to advance Singapore’s education to the next level.

The Core 3 Research Programme (Core 3) has been reconceptualised to include a Regular component, one of the two categories of sub-studies aimed at improving the utility of findings that are aligned to MOE’s knowledge needs and ensuring the timeliness of reporting of findings for MOE’s monitoring purposes. The Regular component is complemented with an Exploratory component which comprise sub-studies to investigate learning outcomes which are difficult to measure, conduct innovative data collection methods and analytical approaches, develop evaluation studies investigating curriculum implementation and enactment, and develop curriculum and pedagogical innovations. In particular, this study includes a significant, highly refined regular component that examines classroom pedagogy and an exploratory component that develops indicators for new subject domains and further examines teacher pedagogical reasoning. This Core 3 programmatic study (henceforth, “C3-PP”) follows a five-year subject domain sampling design that began in 2015. While the subjects that are the focus of this study (English Language, Mathematics, Additional Mathematics, History, Geography, Literature, Music, Visual Arts, Physical Education, Computer Applications, henceforth cumulatively termed “focus subjects”) are wide ranging, they follow the Core 3 data collection schedule for the years 2017 and 2018. The sampling design and subjects have been agreed upon by the MOE and NIE.

Since the launch of the Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (1997) and Teach Less, Learn More (2004) initiatives, the CORE Research Programme has aimed to provide a systemic description and measurement of curriculum and reform initiatives. CORE 1 (2004-2007) focused on lesson observations and surveys in English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies and Mother Tongue classrooms at the Primary 5 and Secondary 3 levels. The study however, was unable to examine specific classroom pedagogical and assessment practices centred on epistemic, cognitive, metacognitive, disciplinary and domain-specific intellectual work. CORE 2 (2009-2014) focused on pedagogical beliefs, classroom practices and assessment practices (Hogan, Towndrow, Kwek, & Chan, 2013). Currently, CORE 3 is centrally focused on the questions: “How do teachers teach?” and “Why do they teach the way they do?” The project in focus is a baseline investigation of Social Studies (SS) and Character and Citizenship Education (CCE) pedagogy (2016-17).

The role of rhetorical knowledge in English language learning can be framed as a fundamental problem in the study of human communication. Communication cannot be simply explained as a process of encoding by the communicator followed by a process of decoding by the audience. Given the richness of the human language, whatever can be coded in one way can be coded in some other way (Sperber & Wilson, 1990). Rhetoric is conventionally understood as the art of using written or spoken language effectively and persuasively. Being the medium of classroom teaching and learning, language plays a significant role in communicating meaning. Rhetorical analysis enables pupils to examine 'not only what authors communicate but also for what purposes they communicate those messages, what effects they attempt to evoke in readers, and how they accomplish those purposes and effects' (Graff, 2010). However, when linguistic knowledge is imparted mainly through procedural and conceptual instruction, the role of rhetorical knowledge in English language learning is at risk of being interpreted narrowly as linguistic creativity, alone. Using data taken from an on-going, large-scale study of pedagogical practices in Singapore, this paper demonstrates the value of rhetorical knowledge as a powerful tool in meaning making in English language classrooms. A case-study is presented of a teacher who generates rhetorical awareness in her pupils by weaving her pupils' current knowledge, abilities and interests with aspects of 16th century English taking into account rhetorical devices employed by Shakespeare against the historical backdrop of the Elizabethan era. Given the Ministry of Education's focus on literacy development and not just linguistic proficiency that enables students to 'make structural and linguistic choices to suit purpose, audience, context and culture' (Rubdy & Tupas, 2009), the paper concludes with recommendations for a set of pedagogical guidelines in operationalising rhetorical knowledge in English language classrooms.

Since the launch of the Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (1997) and Teach Less, Learn More (2004) initiatives, the CORE Research Programme has aimed to provide a systemic description and measurement of curriculum and reform initiatives. CORE 1 (2004-2007) focused on lesson observations and surveys in English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies and Mother Tongue classrooms at the Primary 5 and Secondary 3 levels. The study however, was unable to examine specific classroom pedagogical and assessment practices centred on epistemic, cognitive, metacognitive, disciplinary and domain-specific intellectual work. CORE 2 (2009-2014) focused on pedagogical beliefs and practices, classroom practices and assessment practices (Hogan, Towndrow, Kwek, & Chan, 2013). Currently, CORE 3 is centrally focused on the questions: “How do teachers teach?”and“Why do they teach the way they do?” The project in focus is a baseline investigation of science pedagogy (2015-16).