Abstract:

Ministry of Education Singapore(MOESG) called for all schools to adopt one day of e-learning a week where students will learn remotely from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being new to blended learning, teachers' experiences may differ greatly. Having differing experiences will promote a vibrant scene in Singapore blended learning sphere. It is thus important to tap on the research on Singapore’s Chinese teachers’ differing understanding towards blended learning as a data-driven supporting force to the development of teacher training programs. Information on teachers’ understanding, values and beliefs of blended learning at this early stage will reveal the differing beliefs and perceptions teachers hold towards blended learning. This paper hypothesises that there could be a hierarchical relationship between teachers’ differing perceptions of blended learning. This hypothesis was based on Gosselin et al. (2016)’s research. He found that in the implementation of blended learning, there are three categories of teachers, namely, “the enthusiastic embracers”, “the fearful sceptics” and “the fresh entrants”. These categories are hierarchical. They also found that there are threshold concepts, attitudes and skills between each categories of teachers (Gosselin et al.,2016). These threshold concepts, attitudes and skills can effectively address the content of teacher training programme. The objective of this study is to explore Chinese teachers’ experiences in blended teaching, attempting to uncover their attitudes, beliefs, and practices, thereby unravel the possible variance between different groups of teachers.

This research engages the phenomenography methodology to discover individuals’ perceptions, as well as, the similarities and difference between individuals. Phenomenography is a “research method for mapping the qualitatively different ways in which people experience, conceptualise, perceive, and understand various aspects of a phenomena in the world around them”(Marton,1986). In this research, interviews will be done with 20 teachers. The teachers will be selected through a questionnaire that focused on their prior experience towards blended learning prior to year 2020.

During the interview, the researcher will try to “elicit underlying meanings and intentional attitudes towards the phenomenon being investigated” by “exploring concrete examples of the phenomenon”. All interviews will be recorded and transcribed. At the end of the interview, the seven steps of data analysis proposed by Sjostrom and Dahlgren(2002) will be done. Using this methodology, all “utterances are brought together into categories on the basis of their similarities, categories are differentiated from each other in terms of their differences”(Akerlind,2005). The interview transcripts compiled will be read and re-read for familiarisation, then answers will be coded. A condensation and reduction of the interview content will follow to identify the core parts of the interview. A initial classification will be done at this stage through the search for similarities and differences in the transcript. Then the categories will be named. At the end of this process, a comparison and contrast will be done to describe the nature of each category and to identity the relationship between each category, creating the outcome space.

With this outcome space, I will attempt to surface relevant threshold concepts, skills and attitudes between each category of descriptions.

Keywords:

Blended learning, teacher training, COVID-19, phenomenography, interview, Singapore, Chinese Language.