Reconciling discourse about geography and teaching geography: the case of Singapore pre-service teachers

ABSTRACT

This study draws upon a Foucauldian notion of discourse to explore how four pre-service geography teachers in Singapore made decisions about what geography is and how to enact their understandings of geography in their classrooms. This analysis of discursive power is particularly relevant to Singapore because of the high level of state control over geography and teacher education. The particular ways in which teacher education is organised in this context also exert a number of conflicting discursive pressures that pre-service teachers have to reconcile in their subject conceptions and practice. Drawing upon data gathered from concept maps, photo-elicitation exercises, interviews and analyses of teachers' lesson plans and school curricular documents, the study highlights the dominance of discourses at the state and school levels in the Singapore geography education context. However, it also notes the ways through which participants “resisted” discourse, underscoring the importance of pre-service teachers' professional identities and beliefs about geography education in sustaining their practice through difficult times.

KEYWORDS:

• Subject knowledge and beliefs
• geographical education
• classroom practice
• teacher education
• teacher identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Teaching Practice is a 10-week long school attachment, part of the year-long Post-Graduate Diploma in Teaching (PGDE) programme, in which all four participants were enrolled.

2. This paper refers to the syllabus in place during the time of data collection. At the time of writing, a new geography syllabus has been implemented for the upper secondary level in 2013 and for the lower secondary level in 2014. This change does not affect the main arguments in this paper.

3. This definition of subject knowledge includes both the cognitive (content knowledge for teaching, substantive and syntactic structures) and affective dimensions (beliefs about the subject).

4. Only the top students in the graduating cohort are selected to do an additional year in their subject major. Within geography, it is in the Honours year that students formally study the philosophical traditions and paradigm shifts in the discipline.