The legacy of instrumentality in policy and pedagogy in the teaching of English: the case of Singapore

Abstract

Combining two metaphors we argue that apart from official educational policy, there exists a palimpsest of cumulatively added prior policies sedimented in teachers’ pedagogy, in addition to quasi‐official phantom policies formed at the local level. We argue that these affect teachers’ practices and beliefs in ways that may run counter to the desire of policy‐makers to change educational regimes. Using research from a two‐year long professional development project with teachers from two Singaporean secondary schools, we contend that while the top is busily redesigning the education system in general, and language and literacy teaching in particular, in ways that foster enquiry and higher‐level work with a wide range of texts, in the micro‐context of the classroom a long‐standing instrumentalist logic prevails. We conclude that innovators need to be very cognisant of the legacy of past written and unwritten policies embedded in teachers’ practices and beliefs when planning and engaging in professional development work.

Keywords:

• policy
• literacy
• Singapore
• pedagogy
• innovation