Li-Ching Ho

Global Multicultural Citizenship Education: A Singapore Experience

ABSTRACT In a world that is, on the one hand, determined to sustain distinct national and group identities and, on the other hand, becoming increasingly globalized, interconnected and interdependent, social studies educators are regularly faced with the challenge of supporting diversity, creating a unified national community, and promoting global perspectives through education. This paper explores how the Singapore education system addresses these disparate goals through its national social studies curriculum for secondary schools, particularly through its use of international case studies. The Singapore social studies curriculum also serves as an interesting case study of how a national social studies curriculum has been shifted away from an exclusive focus on a nation-centric paradigm to one that is more globally oriented in nature, while still being firmly anchored to the nation-state and its priorites.

Civic Disparities: Exploring Students' Perceptions of Citizenship within Singapore's Academic Tracks

Drawing on individual interviews with 62 students from three secondary schools, the authors of this study investigate how Singapore students from different educational tracks understand their role as citizens in a democracy. In contrast to most countries, the constitutionally democratic state of Singapore explicitly assigns separate citizenship roles to students from different education tracks. Premised on the principle of meritocracy, the Singapore state has also developed separate citizenship education programs incorporating different values, skills, and knowledge for students from the academic and vocational tracks. The study illustrates sharp disparities in how citizenship and democracy is conceptualized by students from the different education tracks. The differences in civic efficacy, learning outcomes, knowledge, and skills also closely parallel the different goals of the social studies and citizenship education programs for students from the academic and vocational tracks.

Sorting citizens: Differentiated citizenship education in Singapore

Using Singapore as a case study, this paper examines how the discourses of democratic elitism and meritocracy help allocate different citizen roles to students and define the nature of the social studies citizenship education programmes for different educational tracks. While the Singapore education system is not unique in its stratification of students into distinct educational tracks with diverse educational outcomes, it is one of the very few countries with explicitly differentiated formal national citizenship curricula for students from different educational tracks. Students are formally allocated different citizenship roles and responsibilities according to the hierarchy defined by the state. Three distinct roles can be identified: (1) elite cosmopolitan leaders; (2) globally-oriented but locally-rooted mid-level executives and workers; and (3) local ‘heartlander’ followers. To cater to these different citizen roles, the three programmes encompass significantly different curricular goals, content, modes of assessment, civic skills, and values. The findings indicate that only the elite students have access to citizenship education that promotes democratic enlightenment and political engagement. The social studies curriculum for students in the vocational track, in contrast, focuses almost exclusively on imparting a pre-determined body of knowledge and set of values deemed necessary for academically low-achieving students.

Transmitting Social and National Values Through Education in Singapore: Tensions in a Globalized Era

There are diverse opinions regarding the place of values in the curriculum and also approaches to be employed when teaching values. In Singapore, values education is accorded high priority. Characteristic of countries with highly centralized systems, the Singapore state expresses the set of national values that emphasizes communitarian principles, consensus and cohesion in detail, and systematically transmits them to students via the formal curriculum. In Singapore, values education is primarily subject-based and is carefully planned, with a clearly delineated list of aims and objectives to culturally reproduce the elites’ view of Singapore society. Much of the discourse surrounding the national values, however, is dominated by the state’s focus on national interest and pragmatism. In this chapter, the authors take the position that schools in Singapore are deliberately created social institutions that are nested within particular social, political and economic realities, and as such, they serve as a means of maintaining social control and sustaining the status quo. The transmission of the prescribed set of national values through school subjects has mostly been deemed unproblematic and is seldom troubled. Nonetheless, the social, political and economic pressures, brought about by the forces of globalization, have problematized the conception of values education in Singapore. In this chapter, the authors examine how a newly introduced subject in secondary schools – Social Studies – is framed by the national values and ideologies defined by the state, and discuss the inherent tensions brought about by changing contexts. They argue that such an approach is both constraining and inadequate, when what is needed to ensure student wellbeing in the current era is an understanding and recognition of diversity, alternative visions of the world and multiliteracies.

Interrogating differentiated citizenship education: Students’ perceptions of democracy, rights and governance in two Singapore schools

Across and within democratic societies, youth experiences of education for citizenship vary widely. A growing body of research suggests that students’ experiences of democratic citizenship education will differ according to how academic programmes, community culture, socio-economic status and gender intersect with prevailing conceptions of equality, mutual respect and reciprocity. This qualitative study explores how democratic citizenship education is enacted in two secondary schools with very dissimilar academic programmes and policies. A key finding in the study is fissures in perceptions of civic engagement and democratic rights between students from the two schools, thus suggesting that academic programmes and policies can differentiate the manner in which students are prepared to fulfil their roles as citizens.

Teaching Controversial Issues in Geography: Climate Change Education in Singaporean Schools

Abstract In this article, the authors investigate 6 Singaporean geography teachers’ understandings of climate change education. The findings indicate that the participants held very different beliefs about the primary purposes of climate change education, in spite of the highly centralized national curriculum and the unambiguous state support for the science of climate change. The findings suggest that the diversity in teachers’ understandings of the purposes of climate change education and their preferred pedagogical approaches reflect some of the tensions within the larger education system in Singapore.

Singapore teachers’ beliefs about the purpose of climate change education and student readiness to handle controversy

ABSTRACT This qualitative study examines what four pre-service and six practicing geography educators in Singapore schools believe to be the purpose of climate change education, and how this intersects with their beliefs about student readiness to handle controversy within climate change education. A key finding of this study indicates that the teachers’ understandings about the purpose of climate change education played the most important role in shaping their perspectives about introducing controversy to their students. The study also suggested that the teachers’ beliefs about their students’ academic abilities had implications for how they approached controversy for different groups of students.

National and Global Citizenship Education: Case Studies from Two Singapore Social Studies Classrooms

In Singapore, educators have to balance nationalist ideals with more cosmopolitan values and skills that are deemed essential for the countrys survival in the global marketplace. In particular, teachers and students have to grapple with two very different goals articulated in the national curriculum – “Being Rooted” and “Living Global.” Through the use of individual interviews and classroom observations, this study examines Singapore secondary students’ understandings of national and global citizenship. The findings from the study suggest that the students are strongly committed to national priorities and are less committed to the cosmopolitan values. These two case studies also underscore the significant impact of high-stakes national examinations on modes of instruction and are suggestive of the crucial role political and institutional contexts play in shaping students and teachers’ perspectives of citizenship.

‘Freedom can only exist in an ordered state’: harmony and civic education in Singapore

Abstract This paper uses the concept of stories of peoplehood to examine how the Singapore government has constructed a story of harmony and to consider how this story has influenced two important school subjects focused on civic education: Social Studies and Character and Citizenship Education. Stories of peoplehood, including constitutive, economic and political power stories, play a central role in the political project of people-making which involves defining the nature of membership in a political community and promoting a collective political identity. This study provides an alternative way of conceptualizing the goals and curriculum content of civic education and it also offers an example of how a nation state with a strong Confucian tradition has chosen to address the educational goal of living together through the promotion of values such as social cohesion and community relationships within a story of harmony. The study also shows how Singapore political leaders construct a narrow and limited discourse of harmony within the curricula and use it to legitimize policies that privilege particular groups, limit political freedoms, marginalize groups with less power or status, and circumscribe the kinds of actions a citizen can legitimately take.

Harmony and Multicultural Education in Singapore

Multicultural education varies greatly in different countries because the social and political norms of a given community and the different historical trajectories of nations greatly affect curricular decisions, content, and values.