Teo, J.E.;
(2025)
Retrieving Schwab’s practical in Shulman’s signature pedagogies: unpacking the moral dimension in Singapore’s educational leadership development.
London Review of Education
, 23
(1)
, Article 14. 10.14324/LRE.23.1.14.
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Abstract
Looking at school leadership development in Singapore through Shulman’s signature pedagogies, I found two limitations in the framework. First, the conception of pedagogy as ‘forms of teaching and learning’ does not support adequate consideration of wider cultural influences on leadership development. Second, the framework’s focus on how novice practitioners are prepared for their ‘new professions’ does not readily support nuanced consideration of the need for professional unlearning by experienced educators who have developed leadership (dis)abilities on the job. At the same time, a scan of literature on signature pedagogies in leadership development reveals a tendency to either apply Shulman’s ideas generally as a descriptive construct, or more specifically as an analytical framework for articulating the surface, deep and implicit structures of signature pedagogies. I contend that the broader nature of Shulman’s framework as morally committed deliberative curriculum inquiry seems underexplored. I address this gap by retrieving Joseph Schwab’s language of the practical in Shulman’s signature pedagogies. Schwab was Shulman’s esteemed teacher. I show how this retrieval enriches the signature pedagogies framework for better application on school leadership development, and how the implicit structure of Singapore’s pedagogy for school leadership development entails provoking shifts in mindsets from a smaller focus on ‘leading in my school’ towards the bigger perspective of ‘leading in a wider ecosystem of schools’. The enriched language of signature pedagogies to include consideration of cultural values and what counts as educational leadership can be put to work for critical reflection on existing and alternative pedagogical forms in diverse contexts.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Retrieving Schwab’s practical in Shulman’s signature pedagogies: unpacking the moral dimension in Singapore’s educational leadership development |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/LRE.23.1.14 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.23.1.14 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025, Juin Ee Teo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | deliberative curriculum inquiry, educational leadership, school leadership, Joseph Schwab, the practical, signature pedagogies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10210862 |
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