(Re)Imagining the future of educator organizing: empowering educators that can navigate Singapore’s changing educational landscape

• In Event: Empowerment, Decolonization, and Global-Local Perspectives in Education

Proposal

Introduction
While it is logical that educator organizing has a direct contribution to educational development, the important work of teachers’ unions has only recently been more systematically and comprehensively discussed in academic scholarship. This attention follows the louder voices of teachers’ unions across the globe, calling for the work of teachers to be better recognized and for more effective reforms in teachers’ working conditions, compensations, and equity (Ford & Ward, 2021; Han & Keefe, 2023).

Against this backdrop, educator organizing in Singapore is fascinating. Unlike in many parts of the world, industrial actions in the nation state are now rare. Yet, Singapore’s high-performing education system is widely recognized today as one of the world’s best (Liu 2022). A recent study focusing on the 70 years of work by the nation state’s largest teachers’ union, the Singapore Teachers’ Union (STU), highlights that through industrial, professional, and social unionism, STU has protected and fought for its members. This has contributed to the foundation of teacher preparation, teachers, and teaching, and hence the high quality of education that Singapore experiences today (Nazeer-Ikeda & Asada, 2024). However, a gap remains glaring – the relevance of teachers’ unions in a context that seems to have attained “success”. This is an important consideration, given that the educational landscape in Singapore continues to evolve. Education policies that are underpinned by twenty-first century competencies (MOE Singapore, 2024) continue to lead transformations in schools, having a direct impact on teachers and teaching (Nazeer-Ikeda, 2021).


Theoretical Framework and Research Questions
This paper draws upon understandings of social constructivism and its power politics (Wendt, 1992; 2015), an extension of Vygotsky’s perspective on knowledge construction. Despite criticisms of the theory (Fierke, 2021), its engagement in this paper is to bring forth the essence of a collective construction of knowledge, behaviors, and values that are innate to labor organizing which by nature engages in both associational power and structural power (Wright, 2000). This also establishes the premise that teachers in unions are active participants and not passive recipients of policies. It is particularly relevant in Singapore as firstly, its teachers’ unions are now more focused on professional and social unionism since industrial issues are currently less rampant. Secondly, the power dynamics in Singapore’s state-labor relationship has developed from confrontational to more collaborative with (perhaps even co-optation by) the state. Hence, it is critical that a discussion of educator organizing in Singapore includes both elements of joint construction and power dynamics.

This paper asks two key questions - what are the challenges facing teachers’ unions in Singapore’s changing educational landscape? and, what strategic plans are being engaged by teachers’ unions to navigate these?


Methodology
Data collection is fittingly focused on the four teachers’ unions in Singapore – STU, Kesatuan Guru-Guru Melayu Singapura (i.e. the Singapore Malay Teachers’ Union), the Singapore Tamil Teachers’ Union, and the Singapore Chinese Teachers’ Union. This study takes a qualitative approach to provide in-depth answers to the research questions. First, a baseline understanding is gained through qualitative analysis of the reports and websites of the four unions, policy documents by Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE) and its affiliates, the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) website and its reports, academic and trade publications, as well as media reports. This examination is guided by a key question – what are the challenges facing teachers and their unions in Singapore?

Next, this data is supplemented with in-depth face-to-face interviews with the four union representatives. The interviews were semi-structured and conducted individually. They covered four core areas – the missions and motivations of the unions, their current strategies and programs, the current challenges facing them, and their future plans. Each interview lasted over 100 minutes and was audio-recorded. Analysis for this paper followed the two aforementioned research questions, with emerging themes grouped and labeled accordingly.


Findings
The findings reveal that alongside Singapore’s changing educational landscape, there are persisting and new challenges facing teachers and their unions. Behind Singapore’s glittering educational success, is the work of its teachers. Over the years, the nature of teachers’ workload may have changed (e.g. less administrative work with digitalization) but the total amount of work itself remains a pain point for teachers and their unions. This is made worse by the unrelentless results-oriented culture in the teaching profession, the education system, and Singapore’s wider society. Relatedly, the well-being of teachers is the focus of attention.

More interestingly, however, is the consequent shift in Singapore’s educator organizing landscape. Pre-1965, teachers’ unions in Singapore were galvanized with a common goal towards the nation’s independence and briefly thereafter, for teachers’ working conditions. This was followed by a long period when the unions work fairly independently, focusing on their members’ unique concerns. The digital revolution, however, presents shared concerns amongst the unions, creating opportunities for more collaborative work. Furthermore, the findings show that through dialogue and collaborations, all four unions share issue-focused and solution-oriented mindsets as well as organizational policy dexterity to navigate challenges. These findings lead to the argument that through shared values, collective action, and the joint construction of ideas (akin to social constructivism), teachers’ unions in Singapore empower its members to navigate the changing educational landscape.


Originality and Significance
This empirical study provides a nuanced understanding of how educator organizing can strategically alleviate the challenges presented by a digital society and even turn these into opportunities to continually remain relevant. Singapore has been chosen because historically, its educator organizing and educational development are closely related, thus providing a significant case internationally in imagining a trajectory of educator organizing in a digital age. For Singapore’s own academic discourse, given that much of its educational achievement has been attributed to the quality of its teachers (Goodwin et. al., 2017), it is important to address the sustainability of this success amidst contextual and industrial developments in order to appropriately (re)position the role of teachers and their unions. With these, the paper hopes to open opportunities for transferable insights when (re)imagining the future of educator organizing elsewhere.


References
Not a requirement but available upon request.

Author

• Rita Z. Nazeer-Ikeda, Waseda University