The discursive construction of responsibility among teachers in Singapore: “Everything is good, so we do everything”

• Published in: Asia Pacific education review 2024, 25(1), 81, pp.187-200
• Main Author: Lee, Yew-Jin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Education; Resistance (Psychology); Teacher Responsibility; Teachers; Teaching; Teaching Methods; 교육학
• ISSN: 1598-1037; 1876-407X
• DOI: 10.1007/s12564-023-09840-6

Teachers’ work in school is said to be under increasing pressure from neoliberal forces. Key constructs that are essential in understanding how teachers cope with these changes are teacher responsibility and teacher accountability, which are closely related within scholarly and everyday contexts although serving different logics and outcomes. By taking a constructionist approach in Discursive Psychology toward analyzing interview data, we specifically attempted to examine teacher responsibility from their talk in this study. Based on a sample of primary and secondary teachers from mainstream government schools in Singapore, it was found that they used various rhetorical strategies when talking about responsibility at work to perform a number of discursive functions such as managing identity, morality, being knowledgeable about, and reconciling the main purposes of teaching. This discourse analytic method complements as well as adds to knowledge obtained from typical qualitative content analyses regarding teacher responsibility. We conclude with some practical recommendations for improving the working conditions of teaching in school.