How Context Shapes Teachers' Beliefs of and Responses to Learners and Learner Diversity in Singapore

• In Event: 77.058 - MTCC Roundtable Session 36
  In Roundtable Session: 77.058-2 - Temporalities of Educational Policy, Reform, and Learner Diversity in Global Contexts

Abstract

Curriculum and pedagogy, as with teachers’ understanding and appreciation of learner differences, are never acontextual. This qualitative study examines how teachers in Singapore perceived and attended to learners and learner diversity through differentiated instruction, an educational approach borrowed from the U.S. Interview and observation data reveal that teachers rarely centered learners in their practice. Teachers understood learner diversity based on learners’ abilities, and learner diversity was almost never celebrated in class. Learner diversity undertook localized meanings under the influence of education/state policies and local culture. This has implications for how we define learner diversity and how the transfer of educational ideas, like differentiated instruction, warrants a study of contextual influences when transferred from the U.S. to other countries.

Author

• Tang T. Heng, Nanyang Technological University - National Institute of Education