Enriching the space of learning through weaving: how a teacher builds her students' understanding of (a) genre over time

Abstract

This article draws its data from a collaborative intervention project Expanding Textual Repertoires, which sought to help English teachers develop their students' higher-order work with language and texts in Singapore secondary schools. The focus is on the strategy of weaving, a form of connection-making which involves the deliberate shifting between levels and kinds of knowledge across instructional episodes, lessons and units and which facilitates students' progressively deeper exploration of concepts and skills over time. Drawing on relevant theoretical and conceptual discussions in educational linguistics and the learning sciences, the article first unpacks what makes explicit attention to relationships between different dimensions of knowledge an important factor in promoting intellectually challenging, engaging and coherent learning experiences. It then shows through the detailed analysis of the overall architecture of a curriculum unit on the news story genre and two episodes from its lessons what weaving looks like in an enacted curriculum which is intended to support students in their understanding of both the particular genre in focus and, more broadly, socially valued ways of exploring genre in the context of their school subject.

Keywords:

• classroom interaction
• genre
• knowledge construction
• scaffolding macro-level, designed-in teaching
• curricular coherence; temporal dimension of learning

Notes

1. In Singapore, neighbourhood schools are schools located in public housing estates with the majority of students from working and lower middle class families, many of whom speak a language other than English at home. With few exceptions, neighbourhood schools tend to be positioned in the lower bands of the national league table, a system that ranks schools annually according to their academic performance.

2. This special focus project, Literacy Practices in Secondary Schools: Expanding Textual Repertoires, was funded, with the approval of Singapore's Ministry of Education, by the Centre for Research in Pedagogy and Practice at the National Institute of Education.

3. While Bernstein employs the notions of hierarchy and grammaticality to describe the knowledge structures of different fields, Christie and Macken-Horarik (2007) have applied his concepts to the recontextualization of knowledge in school curricula. They have shown how students in subject English tend to experience a developmental trajectory that makes integrating and subsuming previous knowledge into ever more generalizing propositions very difficult. The often invisible pedagogy of subject English renders the knowledge structure non-hierarchical and the relations between its various elements weak and inconsistent, so that students experience segmental rather than integrative acquisition of educational knowledge.