Building teachers' creative capabilities in Singapore's English classrooms: a way of contesting pedagogical instrumentality

• Published in: Literacy (Oxford, England) England), 2007-07, Vol.41 (2), p.71-78
• Main Authors: Kwek, Dennis, Albright, Jim, Kramer-Dahl, Anneliese
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: community of learners; Creative Teaching; Creativity; critical and creative reading; English Instruction; English language; Foreign Countries; Foreign language learning; Group Activities; Language Teachers; Literacy; Professional Development; Program Descriptions; Reader Text Relationship; Reading; Reading Instruction; Reading Materials; reading pedagogy; Second Language Instruction; Secondary Education; secondary English language education in Singapore; Secondary School Teachers; Singapore; teacher professional development; Teachers
• ISSN: 1741-4350; 1741-4369
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9345.2007.00460.x

This paper presents a pedagogical intervention project conducted in secondary English classrooms in Singapore, entitled “Building Communities of Readers among Teachers”. The project is positioned against the dominant instrumentalism of Singaporean approaches to creativity and promotes a socio‐cultural stance to creativity and criticality in English language education. Currently in progress, the project seeks to foster teachers' rich textual engagements and to connect them with those they provide for their students. Situating the professional development in communities of reading circles, teachers' own, often narrow repertoires of reading are foregrounded, allowing them to experience the struggle of an active engagement with texts, and thus facilitating a re‐imagining of their reading pedagogies, which at present are highly scripted and authoritative. The ultimate aim is to enable them to re‐imagine their reading pedagogies in ways that encourage the creative and critical possibilities that textual openness can bring to classroom practice and learning.