The Enacted School Mathematics Curriculum

Abstract

This chapter comprises three sections. In the first section, we make reference to the previous chapter on “The intended school mathematics curriculum”. We broaden the discussion to the age-old question of bridging the intended–enacted curriculum gap. Here we draw on the international literature corpus to highlight how this gap is faced everywhere before coming back to the Singapore setting—with her unique challenges and affordances. In the second section, we draw on multi-sites research projects that are of scale on how mathematics is taught in Singapore classrooms and map the way mathematics is taught across a number of Singapore schools with a view of representing broadly the enacted curriculum. While these larger scale research can be seen as giving us a broad overview—the “airplane” view of Singapore mathematics teaching—the next section can be regarded as zoomed-in views of specific sites where the research focuses on how various contextual elements come into play to render the carrying out of curricular goals of teaching in actual classrooms challenging. We do this by drawing on classroom research studies of relatively small scale that reveal interesting complexities that are too fine-grained in the bigger studies. We end this section with a description of a current research project that draws upon both these lenses of looking at enactment. We conclude the chapter by reflecting on the question: Is there a distinctly “Singapore pedagogy”?