The curriculum landscape in Singapore has been recently undergoing significant changes. Under the overriding framework of "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation" (1997), the Ministry of Education (MOE) has been implementing three major initiatives in the schools, namely the IT-Masterplan, the introduction of critical and creative thinking into the curriculum, and National Education. These initiatives are underpinned by related innovations like the reduction in curriculum content, the introduction of project work and changes in school-based assessment and in the examination system.
Changes to the curriculum landscape also include revisions to mother tongue language syllabi, a new social studies syllabus, greater emphasis on sciences via a Life Sciences initiative, the introduction of integrated programmes that allow up to 10 percent of the top students in Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) to skip the GCE "O" Level examinations, a review of the Junior College curriculum with the introduction of Knowledge and Inquiry. There is a growing recognition that a "one size shoe fits all" curriculum is no longer relevant in meeting the needs, aptitudes and abilities of our students. The most recent call to "Teach Less, Learn More" has led schools to experiment with school-based curriculum so that their pupils are more engaged in learning.
These wide-ranging changes to the curricular landscape create significant challenges and opportunities for curriculum research. In the light of our current curricular initiatives and reforms, we identify the following areas of research:
Curriculum Policy Analysis
Educational reform in many nations is often promoted and popularised through the use of slogans. Singapore is no exception and recent discourse on educational reforms and initiatives involves slogan such as "Thinking Schools, Learning Nation" (TSLN), "Engaged Learning", "School-based Curriculum Development" (SBCD), among others. Some of the slogans are educational or curricular concepts directly borrowed from the literature, such as "school-based curriculum development" (SBCD) and "engaged learning". Others are invented by policymakers, like TSLN, TLLM, etc., which are used to convey new visions of curriculum, teaching and learning. Slogans are not without meaning, and they do provide ideas around which people can rally. However, many of these slogans are rather ambiguous; and they are open to different interpretations and mean different things to different groups of people. Such vagueness can result in recipe-like prescriptions for creating change (Case, 1994). There is thus an urgent need to unpack these terms, and critically examine what they mean for schools and imply for curriculum development.
School-based Curriculum Development and Implementation Issues
Schools have been encouraged to innovate
and experiment with school-based curriculum under MOE's TLLM initiative. There
is a need to document what is happening when a particular curricular initiative
is introduced and implemented. There are two levels of
documentation. At the intermediate level between the Ministry and schools,
we need to document the ways in which the Ministry communicates the initiative
to schools. The communication methods might include releasing policy speeches
and circulars, developing new curricular and instructional materials, and
conducting in-service training for school key personnel (principals,
departmental heads and senior teachers), among others. Documentation needs to go
beyond mere description and analyze the potential, limitations and problems
inherent in each of the ways of communicating a new initiative to
schools. We need to examine how effective each of these methods is and how
principals, departmental heads, and school teachers perceive and interpret the
initiative, and how well they are prepared or equipped to implement the
initiative in schools.
At the school or classroom level, research is
needed to examine how the implementation process unfolds in a particular school
or classroom, the difficulties and challenges teachers encounter as they
implement the initiatives, and the kind of support they could receive. Research
methods like questionnaire survey, interviews, case studies, ethnographic
studies and the like can be employed to document and analyze the implementation
processes at both the intermediate and classroom
level.
Building School Capacity for the School-based Curriculum Development and Intervention Projects: Teacher Learning and Development in Professional Learning Communities
The success of curricular initiatives depends on the school's capacity for implementation. Providing opportunities and resources for school teachers to learn what they need to know in the light of the complex demands of implementation and engaging them in such learning are crucial to successful implementations. Teachers need to teach in new ways and take on new roles as they implement new initiatives, as well as the difficulties and challenges they might encounter. Traditional models of teachers' professional development, focused on training teachers in specific skills and procedures through workshops, is inadequate for preparing teachers to implement curriculum initiatives which require them to take on new roles and develop new beliefs and understanding. We need to explore new models of teacher professional development that can stand up to the complexity and challenges of implementation of initiatives.
Asian Cosmopolitanism and Comparative Education
The re-emerged discourse of globalization at the last decade of 20th
century has made tremendous and constant impact on social theory and
curriculum studies. The controversy mainly rests on the consequence of
globalization and its outcome. The debate over the consequence of
globalization among social theorists usually engenders two extremes of
argument. One asserts that nation-state disappears in the process of
globalization; the other contends that nation-state remains the same.
Though most perspectives social theorists address are in-between, the
binary between two extremes still exists. This intellectual momentum
mostly gained from the emerged EU has produced dramatic effect in
curriculum studies as well. Issues in curriculum related to national
imaginaries, national education, globalization, hybridity, and the
recent debate over the ancient term cosmopolitanism are some exemplars.
The
term cosmopolitanism isn't an innovation. However, the concept is given
new meanings when it links to the notion of globalization in the past
two decades. Cosmopolitan self refers to a subject/subjectivity
constructed in schooling that possesses a flowing identity which does
not stick to the global or the local, a re-invented term that intends to
take away the analytical binary between two opposites. In this sense,
the term cosmopolitanism becomes a new invention as it allows scholars
to explore social or educational facts without the disturbance and
imposition of prior existing dichotomy.
Some conceptual
dichotomies such as social administration and individual freedom
inherited from European Enlightenment. Accordingly, the term
cosmopolitanism has been brought into the debate to interrogate the
inheritance of European Enlightenment, like reason, progress, and human
agency, as well as the prominent discourse circulating back and forth
between the global and the local, e.g. centralization vs.
decentralization and universal vs. particular.
Under the
overwhelming influence of European Enlightenment that continue to lead
the major research community in science and social science in general
and in education in particular, different systems of reasoning which may
shape human actions in various historical, social, and cultural
contexts have been usually ignored. Knowing that globalization is a
continuous process that blurs the binary of the global and the local,
the concept Asian Cosmopolitanism as an analytical tool makes possible
the observation and historical investigation into multifarious
appearances of the similar social or educational phenomena around the
world. In this comparative sense, the uniqueness of one locality becomes
clear. In the context of Singapore, concepts such as Confucianism which
constantly shape subject/subjectivity in schooling in the process of
globalization need to be further explored. The meaning of Confucianism
has been constructed/re-constructed in the on-going process of
globalization (or the amalgamation of globalization and localization
that you cannot tell which is which). It is not just a local concept but
a local yet global notion the meaning of which has changed over time.