Resisting Resistance: The Coping Strategies of Teachers

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore the coping strategies of secondary school teachers in Singapore and focuses on how teachers negotiate the anomaly between the perceived authority of teachers and the actual exercise of their authority. The central argument posit that teachers require more than formal authority to enable them to accomplish their teaching work, and teachers develops a hidden transcript which encompass a variety of ways in which enables them to meet the demands of teaching students, and also to account for any failures. The paper aims to document the various coping strategies of teachers, and to analyze the significance of such coping strategies using the framework of the micro-politics of teaching. Ultimately, this paper tries to demonstrate how teachers respond individually to the structural constraints of the education system, and how they bridge the gap between what they are supposed to achieve ideally and what they can do realistically.