The Games Concept Approach (GCA) as a mandated practice: views of Singaporean teachers

Abstract

This paper reports on the views of Singaporean teachers of a mandated curriculum innovation aimed at changing the nature of games pedagogy within the physical education curriculum framework in Singapore. Since its first appearance over 20 years ago, Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), as an approach to games pedagogy has gathered support around the world. Through a process of evolution TGfU now has many guises and one of the latest of these is the Games Concept Approach (GCA), a name that is given to this pedagogical approach in Singapore. As part of a major national curricular reform project, the GCA was identified as the preferred method of games teaching and, as a result, was mandated as required professional practice within physical education teaching. To prepare teachers for the implementation phase, a training programme was developed by the National Institute of Education in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and well-known experts in the field from the USA. For this part of the study, 22 teachers from across Singapore were interviewed. The data were used to create three fictional narratives, a process described by Sparkes and used more recently by Ryan (2005) in the field of literac. The stories were framed using Foucault's notion of governmentality and Bernstein's notion of regulative discourse. The narratives reveal tales of confusion, frustration but also of hope and enthusiasm.