Retrieving Schwab’s practical in Shulman’s signature pedagogies: unpacking the moral dimension in Singapore’s educational leadership development

Expanding the frame: milieu and cultural values in school leadership development

Applying Schwab’s (1973) four commonplaces (vital factors) which cannot be omitted in defensible educational thought to reflect on limitations in Shulman’s signature pedagogies frame, I found that considerations about subject matter are evident in Shulman’s ideas on the ‘deep structure’ of professional knowledge. Considerations about teachers and learners are evident in his articulation of visible teaching and learning interactions in the ‘surface structure’ of signature pedagogies. However, the fourth commonplace of milieu and the moral dimension or implicit structure of beliefs about societal values needs supplement.

It is not easy to keep the societal context of ‘curriculum’ in view when reading Shulman’s (2005a) article on signature pedagogies. He mentions ‘curriculum’ only once in this seminal article, which foregrounds ‘pedagogy’ (25 mentions) and ‘pedagogies’ (44 mentions). While Alexander (2008b: 13) also foregrounds pedagogy, he explicitly accounts for the inseparable relation of ‘pedagogy, curriculum and culture’. His conception of pedagogy as situated in society is broader than Shulman’s conception for the context of professional education. Alexander (2008b: 13) defines pedagogy as encompassing both the visible acts of teaching and the ‘contingent discourses about the character of culture, the purposes of education, the nature of childhood and learning and the structure of knowledge’. His wider conception of pedagogy coheres with Schwab’s (1973: 503–4) articulation of ‘milieu’ considerations in curriculum deliberation: ‘What are the conditions, dominant preoccupations, and cultural climate of the whole polity and its social classes, insofar as these may affect the careers, the probable fate, and ego identity of the children whom we want to teach?’

Figure 1 shows the three theoretical supplements for eclectic repair of Shulman’s signature pedagogies frame: (1) applying Schwab’s commonplaces to identify ‘milieu’ as area of weakness; (2) drawing on Alexander’s (2008a) ‘primordial values’ for conceptual vocabulary to analyse the cultural dimension in school leadership development; and (3) repairing the understatement of curriculum with Whitson’s (2008: 124) conception of curriculum as ‘the course of human experience in which the formation of human being’ and ‘human institutions, practices, cultures, and societies’ occur. Whitson’s (2008) conception of curriculum is compatible with Shulman’s (2005a: 57) emphasis on ‘pedagogies of formation’ in professional education.

Figure 1

Expanded signature pedagogies frame: three extensions 

According to Alexander (2008a: 81–3), the primordial values ‘are concerned with that most fundamental human question, the relationship of humans to each other and to the communities and societies they inhabit’, influencing ‘the organisational nodes of pedagogy not just for reasons of practical exigency but because they are the social and indeed political nodes of human relations’. Alexander’s primordial values emerged from research on England, France, India, Russia and the United States, organising observations about tendencies towards whole-class instruction (collectivism), learning in small groups (community) or teaching that is focused on personal development (individualism). I will apply these concepts to discuss Singapore’s primordial values and the implications for school leadership development in a later section.

Enriching the frame: school leadership and educational leadership

Expanding Shulman’s framework to include milieu considerations and the pedagogical implications of a society’s primordial values does not address the deeper need for a morally committed language of education that can articulate what constitutes educational leadership. Eisner (2002) explains why we need a morally informed view of what counts as ‘education’ to evaluate instrumental processes such as ‘schooling’ or ‘learning’. He refers to Dewey’s (1938) normative view of educational experiences as ‘growth’ in a person’s ability to pursue ‘inherently worthwhile ends’ to then define non-educational experiences as those that are ‘simply undergone and have no significant effect’, while mis-educational experiences are those that ‘hamper our ability to have further experiences or to cope intelligently’ with complex realities (Eisner, 2002: 37). Thus, we need to clarify what constitutes ‘inherently worthwhile’ educational leadership to discern when schools are being led in non- or even mis-educational ways, reduced to mere instruments for serving external aims.

While Schwab’s use of Aristotle’s practical wisdom (phronesis) spotlights how the concrete realm of dealing with complex human situations differs from the abstract realm of theoretic reasoning (see Schwab, 1978), Carr (1987) and Biesta (2013) argue that the most important Aristotelian distinction for clarifying the nature of educational practice is actually the difference between the two concrete realms of praxis (doing good with fellow human beings) and poiesis (making good objects or things). Thus, while Schwab (1970/2013: 611) warns that curriculum decision-makers will treat real people and things badly if rich realities are taken as ‘replicas’ of simplified theoretic representations, Carr (1987) and Biesta (2013) warn against dealing with human beings as if we are applying techniques to ‘make’ objects or things take predetermined shape. So how can we know when school leadership falls short of leadership that is educational? Figure 2 shows how the implicit structure of signature pedagogy for non-instrumental educational leadership can be distinguished from school leadership that is driven by instrumental thinking and values.

Figure 2

Enriched signature pedagogies frame: the implicit structure of educational leadership 

As shown, eclectic combining of Biesta’s concept of subjectification and Schwab’s quasi-practical deliberation provides a rich language for reflection on whether ‘good’ school leadership that serves the economy or other external aims remains faithful to what counts internally as educational leadership. Leading humanity’s education entails opening bigger mind existential understandings of the world in relation to oneself. Education as subjectification involves desiring ‘interruptive reality checks’ (Biesta, 2020: 98), where we can meet with ‘what is other or different, what challenges, irritates and disturbs us’ (Biesta, 2005: 62). World-centred education is about getting real and dealing with what is real, as opposed to ‘living in a fantasy’ of being at the centre of the world, where we mistakenly believe that we can master or control the world around us to serve our unchecked ‘human-centred’ desires (Biesta, 2022).

Likewise, Schwab’s quasi-practical mode calls on leaders to make life more difficult for themselves (see Eisner, 1984), versus doing what is convenient or expedient without adequate deliberation and justification. The quasi-practical mode of deliberation involves subjecting oneself to the ‘specially heavy intellectual and moral obligation’ of ‘cherishing diversity’, where leaders need to be ‘confronted by unfamiliar vocabularies’ and seemingly ‘alien’ or ‘irrelevant’ considerations in order to consider the widest range of factors for making wiser decisions in educating for human formation (see Schwab, 1970/2013: 595–8). Taken together, educational leaders need to exercise ‘bigger mind’ practical judgement in navigating trade-offs (competing ethical ends), while defending the possibility for education to work with real people (who have a will of their own and need opportunity to make up their own minds) without reducing human beings to objects or theoretic constructs.

Situating the enhanced frame: signature pedagogies as deliberative curriculum inquiry

Thus far, I have proposed theoretical supplements for eclectic repair of Shulman’s signature pedagogies. How does the enhanced frame situate with other applications of signature pedagogies? I scanned literature to explore how Shulman’s ideas have been applied and whether other scholars have discussed the traces of Schwab’s practical deliberation in the signature pedagogies framework. About 31 articles surfaced from applying the search terms ‘signature pedagog* AND leadership’ in EBSCOhost research databases. I browsed 21 articles and judged that 17 were adequate for my purpose. Table 1 shows the four approaches in how Shulman’s conception of signature pedagogies has been applied. None of the 17 articles mention Schwab’s influence, but the 3 articles that apply signature pedagogies more broadly (fourth approach) come closest to activating deliberative curriculum inquiry.

The first two approaches tend to take Shulman’s articulation of signature pedagogies as a given before focusing on distinctive pedagogies for developing ‘educational leaders as scholars’ (for example, Olson and Clark, 2009), or on general discussion of how pedagogies such as ‘collaborative leadership learning groups’ (Kaufman and Stedman, 2022) and ‘discussion pedagogy’ (Jenkins, 2012) are signature forms in leadership education. The third approach advocates specific pedagogies that teach critical thinking and ethical judgement through reasoning about/with lived experiences, for example, case writing (Meyer and Shannon, 2010), participatory action research (Sappington et al., 2010) and discussion of vicarious experience through films (Tan and Koh, 2018).

This article contributes to the fourth approach of applying signature pedagogies as a broader frame to review the existing state of affairs in a domain of professional education. Black and Murtadha (2007: 11) outline problems with focusing on technical rationality in preparing educational leaders and highlight the importance of ‘ethical frameworks’. Weiss et al. (2014: 204) surveyed ‘the demand profile’ or ‘pedagogic signature’ as perceived by experts in the learning disability sector, and they found that demands on teachers focused on the implicit structure. Likewise, in novice coach education, Walsh and Carson (2019: 351–2) note that it is a problem ‘if habits of heart [values] are not explicit’, and if pedagogies continue to focus more on the habits of mind (cognitive mastery) and hand (performance). Walsh and Carson’s (2019: 350) application exemplifies the fuller potential of deliberative curriculum inquiry, as seen in how they view signature pedagogies as providing ‘a language’ for ‘deep interrogation of pedagogical habits’ to ‘critique taken for granted pedagogical processes beyond surface structures’. This article adds to the fourth approach by reconnecting the language of Shulman’s signature pedagogies with Schwab’s language of practical wisdom and deliberative inquiry.

Shulman’s (2005a: 55–8) reasoning exemplifies Schwab’s eclectic deliberation as seen in how he emphasised that signature pedagogies are ‘incomplete’; hence, the need to examine ‘what is missing in this signature pedagogy’ and guard against ‘compromised pedagogy’ where one or more of the intellectual, technical or ethical dimensions of professional education are neglected. We can discern Schwab’s influence on ‘considering the widest possible variety of alternatives’ when Shulman (2005a: 58) cautions that signature pedagogies are ‘prone to inertia’, hence the value in comparative study of signature pedagogies ‘across professions’ to explore ‘alternative approaches for improving professional education that might otherwise not be considered’. This special issue can thus be seen as eclectic deliberation of alternative approaches across national systems, which are perhaps even more prone to inertia. In the next section, I apply the enhanced signature pedagogies frame to critique Singapore’s milieu of primordial values and their implications for school leadership development.

Unpacking Singapore’s primordial values: educational critique of ‘moulding’ people

Singapore, a city state with nearly 6 million people, has around 340 schools with about 400,000 students and 31,000 teachers (see MOE, 2023d: 2). The education system is small, compact and very governable, as compared with others that are spread across large and diverse territories. Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has been governed by one political party. Continuity in political leadership engenders relatively established narratives on national values. In 1989, parliament discussed the usefulness of a national ideology that would express core values to strengthen social cohesion and national identity. After debates on a White Paper about shared values, the following were adopted in 1991:

1. (1)

   nation before community and society above self

2. (2)

   family as the basic unit of society

3. (3)

   community support and respect for the individual

4. (4)

   consensus, not conflict

5. (5)

   racial and religious harmony. (National Library Board, 2014)

Table 2 applies Alexander’s (2008a) definition of the three primordial values and their pedagogical forms to map Singapore’s five espoused values. As shown, none of the values locate with ‘individualism’. Singapore’s values align more with collectivism and community.

The primacy of collectivism in Singapore is rooted in a history of social unrest and racial riots in a deeply polarised society after the failed merger with the Federation of Malaysia (see Gopinathan, 2015). The first value of ‘nation before (racial or religious) community and society above self’ needs to be understood against this backdrop and Singapore’s history of using education to build a nation after decolonisation. Figure 3 illustrates how the primordial values interrelate in Singapore’s milieu. Collectivism is the overarching value, with community as a subset and individualism as a bounded or nested value.

Depending on one’s world view and socialisation in different ways of weighing which primordial value is (or should be) overarching, and consequently which of the other two values are secondary or can be most subordinated, Singapore’s milieu would appear more or less intelligible as cultural text with educational implications. Singapore’s collectivism translates into having a largely centralised school system that maintains relatively tight control over the national curriculum, with structures for supporting school leadership of the collectivist curriculum as instrument for nation building. For a sense of how strange and problematic Singapore’s primordial values could be, collectivist control of education is unthinkable in the United States, given its history of governance systems designed to frustrate and diffuse central power (Cohen and Spillane, 1992) and ‘long-standing political taboos on national curricula’ (Cohen and Barnes, 1993: 219). In the US milieu, individualism and the rights of the individual are overarching, while collectivism (or national cohesion) is arguably the most subordinated.

Figure 3

Interrelation of Singapore’s primordial values 

The Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 was disruptive for all nations. Does Singapore’s adoption of the five shared values in 1991 still hold in a post-pandemic and twenty-first-century context of external economic, geopolitical and technological change, and internal sociocultural, political and inter-generational change? To address this question, I compared the 1991 policy text with a 2021 version from the Singapore government’s pandemic initiative to canvass ‘the rich and diverse views of over 16,900 Singaporeans’ in a series of ‘Emerging Stronger Conversations’ (MCCY, 2021: 3). Figure 4 shows the five twenty-first-century themes for ‘national identity and shared values’ (MCCY, 2021: 6) alongside the primordial values for a sense of continuity and change.

Figure 4

Singapore’s primordial values and five themes from ‘Emerging Stronger Conversations’ (MCCY, 2021) 

There are clear indications of a greater desire among Singaporeans for society to be more welcoming of divergent individualism. As seen in desires for a more ‘compassionate’ and ‘inclusive’ society which has a ‘broader definition of success’ and ‘space for honest conversations’ (MCCY, 2021: 6), Singapore is working to ‘shift away from an overly competitive culture’ (see Ho, 2023). This culture has been regulated for decades by an examination-based meritocracy, where academic achievement has significant impact on future access to opportunities for higher education and career progression. Numerous interconnected reforms have been introduced by the Singapore government to make schooling and lifelong learning pathways more flexible and diverse (see MOE, 2023b). For a sense of how policy rhetoric has registered ground sentiments, Singapore’s fourth prime minister notes that younger Singaporeans ‘do not want to be trapped in an endless rat race or be caught in a constant cycle of comparisons based on narrow definitions of success’; they desire ‘opportunities to pursue their chosen paths, including less conventional ones, off the beaten tracks’ (Wong, 2024: n.p.).

Overall, the tone of official rhetoric and reforms, such as the shift from streaming students towards a more flexible ‘subject-based banding’ approach (MOE, 2023e), reflects how change in Singapore’s milieu entails ‘remoulding’ the education system and collective consciousness without changing the fundamental mould. My use of ‘moulding’ as metaphor to connote social engineering is deliberate. The Ministry of Education’s (MOE, 2024b: n.p.) mission is ‘to mould the future of our nation by moulding the people who will determine our future’. With reference to Biesta’s (2014) three domains of purpose in education, the dominant values in Singapore which shape the functions and leadership of schooling tend to foreground qualification (transmission of knowledge/skills) and socialisation (initiation into shared values/culture), while neglecting subjectification in the sense of teaching that addresses ‘the freedom of another human being’ (Biesta, 2016: 842). The Singapore milieu tends to normalise the objectification of people under the economic frames of developing ‘human capital’ and human (as our only) resource, conceiving of people as if we are mould-able objects who need relentless ‘lifelong learning’ of twenty-first-century competencies (MOE, 2024a), digital literacy competencies (MOE, 2023a), upskilling for the future economy and so on.

This critique of Singapore’s strong instrumental and objectifying tendencies in education might seem compatible with criticisms arising from the primordial value of individualism, such as the lack of individual freedoms of speech, protest or civil disobedience. On the contrary, in suggesting that Singapore needs to pay more attention to the ‘subjectifying’ function of education, my argument is not about the need for more of such individual freedoms. Admittedly, Singapore’s milieu makes it difficult to imagine what a non-instrumental and existential approach to education might look like or how school leadership might address ‘the freedom of another human being’. That said, in this densely populated nation where constrained freedom manifests in mundane and profound ways, I find that our collectivist ethos is compatible with subjectification as the experience of ‘qualified’ freedom, where the world ‘puts real limits on our actions’ (Biesta, 2020: 95–6). If so, how might Singapore’s school leadership development create pedagogical conditions for experienced educators to unlearn the norm of objectifying people?

Unpacking the moral dimension in Singapore’s school leadership development

This section applies the enhanced signature pedagogies frame to unpack the implicit structure of moral commitments in Singapore’s development of middle leadership in schools. After background discussion, I provide examples of pedagogical practices that provoke growth in leadership mindsets from smaller mind operational concerns towards bigger mind concerns about the existential purpose and qualities of education for human formation.

Background, and why focus on middle leadership development

On average, a school in Singapore with more than a thousand students and around a hundred teachers will be led by a school management committee with one principal, two vice principals and about 25–30 middle leaders managing subject departments, staff and student development, key programmes and other aspects of the total curriculum. While school leadership development might focus on how principals are developed, this article looks at middle leadership because it is the starting point of Singapore’s leadership career track. Figure 5 shows the MOE’s (2023c) leadership track and two milestone programmes, the Management and Leadership in Schools (MLS) programme and the Leaders in Education Programme (LEP).

The MLS and LEP are centralised national programmes which complement on-the-job leadership development. Their longer duration and full-time nature enable building relationships with a cohort of fellow leaders in a context where everyone starts off as classmates, without the usual forms of interacting based on job roles or hierarchy. The university-based environment provides psychological distance that can provoke learning beyond one’s comfort zone in ways that differ from on-the-job learning. How are the MLS and LEP related? According to independent observers, the two programmes ‘share philosophies and adult learning principles’, like ‘two halves of the one overarching school leadership development program’ (Jensen et al., 2017: 2). The cohort size for the LEP is about 30 participants per year, while the MLS runs twice a year for about 160 to 200 participants each time. As schools usually release only one middle leader at a time for the MLS, each cohort instantiates a remarkable microcosm and network in Singapore’s education system because over half of the nation’s schools are represented.

With the large MLS cohort size, I find alignment in the surface structure of pedagogical forms and the structuring of Singapore’s primordial values. Figure 6 shows how the forms of teaching and learning in the MLS correspond with: (1) the primacy of collectivism as overarching value where the cohort learns together as a big class through lectures; followed by (2) community as supportive value where the big class is organised into smaller teams for collaborative learning; and, finally, (3) individualism as nested value where each middle leader engages in reflection journaling to make personal sense with course content for rethinking his/her own lived experiences.

Figure 5

Singapore’s school leadership career track and professional development pathways 

Figure 6

Singapore’s primordial values and pedagogical forms in the MLS programme 

Next, I provide examples of selected practices in Singapore’s MLS based on my experience as the programme leader since 2022. In terms of educational connoisseurship and criticism, the examples aim to illustrate how the moral commitments for educational leadership development manifest as concrete pedagogical forms. The aim is to make my private connoisseurship of educational qualities in the MLS experience public, mainly to provide ‘description of those qualities’ (Eisner, 2002: 215), without at this time extending into evaluating the impact of practices on participants and their leadership back in schools.

Deliberative communities for team-based learning in the MLS regional visits

Beyond mass lectures, MLS participants also experience team-based learning to organise an overseas visit to schools, industries and cultural sites in a designated Asian city. The Regional Visits (RV) module is a highlight for many because it provides the rare opportunity to self-organise a five-day official trip with fellow educators from different schools (see Teo, 2024, for more details). Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the usual practice was to gather the cohort in the lecture theatre and have representatives from the 12–15 RV groups take turns to draw lots to allocate destinations. While this approach is very efficient, such that the cohort can immediately break into smaller teams for planning their respective trips, I felt that this was a missed educational opportunity on many levels.

In Shulman’s (2005b: 12) words, signature pedagogies can be described as ‘pedagogies of uncertainty, pedagogies of [emotional] engagement, and pedagogies of formation’. Pedagogical uncertainty heightens engagement and provokes the formation of instincts to navigate the discomfort of not knowing. Efficiently settling the highly anticipated question of ‘Which city will my team be visiting?’ curtails the formative and affective team development/discovery process embodied in questions such as: Who am I travelling with? What is the culture of my team? Why might we design our itinerary in one way but not in another way? What are our shared and divergent interests?

Thus, from the perspective of creating conditions for MLS participants to experience uncertainty, complexity, negotiation of trade-offs and why it matters for educational leadership to focus on connecting with people as people first – not only as members of a workgroup – as well as why we need to lead/manage ourselves – not only the tasks or the team – I decided to slow things down and change the RV initiation process based on Schwab’s practical deliberation and Biesta’s (2022) world-centred education (see Figure 2). Figure 8 provides a sense of the full-day RV deliberative process (extracted from briefing slides).

Figure 7

Teaching slides from MLS orientation, January 2025 

Figure 8

Deliberative process for MLS regional visits 

Below are unsolicited views from three MLS participants who replied to my emailed appreciation for the enacted RV process, with their reflective comments about their learning experience. I have their stated consent for sharing their perspectives as personal communication with attribution:

Reflecting on the Regional Visit process, your introduction of ‘Educational’ MLS in the first week followed by reinforcement of this idea with the purpose of schooling to open a bigger world of opportunities, to provoke us out of our comfort zone really un-set a lot of our mindsets.

(J. Foo, personal communication, 17 July 2024)

Instead of the old practice where representatives drew lots to get the assigned countries for the visit, this current mode where we sat together … to decide collectively, which countries we wanted to visit, allowed us to have the autonomy to make choices (though still subjected to balloting if oversubscribed), so that our learning can be richer.

(S. Lim, personal communication, 17 July 2024)

The case studies for our lunchtime discussion were also helpful so that we can hear one another out, voice out our concerns over some of the case studies, and through the discussions, we came to the understanding of ‘One for All, All for One’, propose but do not impose, etc.

(S. Lim, personal communication, 17 July 2024)

Thank you for focusing on People as the Priority, LT12 on Tuesday is a world-centred education in its very own, chaotic and yet beautiful way … half of the RV groups are allocated first choice does not come coincidentally.

(Y.K. Phang, personal communication, 18 July 2024)

A pedagogy that harnesses uncertainty is risky for the teacher as well as for students. The critical change in timing and manner of balloting to allocate RV destinations appears to be working in a desirably educative direction, although I do have a few pieces of anonymous student feedback from each cohort that express a preference for settling the allocation of cities earlier. The icon of a campfire in Figure 8 draws on another colleague’s teaching point for the MLS cohort, namely the need for teachers to hold the attention of students in ways that are analogous to the allure of campfires. In my view, the irreversible moment where the cohort’s attention will be split into researching details about their allocated RV destination is justifiably deferred, to make time for inherently worthwhile processes, thus qualifying as an act of educational leadership.