Tan, Marcus Cheng Chye

Virtual Reality (VR) and Immersive Virtual Environments (IVEs) are increasingly becoming employed in the classroom to facilitate embodied forms of experiential learning in sensorially rich contexts. This chapter presents the findings of a study conducted with 15-year-old students in a Singapore school. The study evaluated the effectiveness of IVEs as a novel pedagogical approach to the teaching of social and emotional competencies, in the context of Character and Citizenship Education; it sought to ascertain if the affordances of VR and IVEs—immersion, presence and embodiment—when accompanied by real-world narratives would facilitate greater empathy, perspective-taking and responsible decision-making. Students were divided into three treatment conditions: IVEs, “pen-and-paper” mental simulation and video-viewing, and each treatment contained a problem scenario that involved an ethical dilemma young people in Singapore today face. A quasi-experimental, pre-test post-test, non-equivalent group design was employed and the study adopted a mixed-method approach to data collection. The findings show how IVEs can effectively facilitate perspective-taking and empathy, and this is due to its ability to immerse the user in the fictional space of the narrative, thereby encouraging a deeper sense of presence and embodiment.

Examines new and recent Southeast Asian performances and artists Engages specifically with political theatres Expands the discussion around censorship and gender with new and 'inside' perspectives

This paper will examine the poetics of sound archiving as a means of documenting and evaluating Singapore’s cultural and political economy. It is twofold in consideration: an inquiry into sound’s significance for/in Singapore and the media/tion of archiving sound. This first concern involves an investigation of selected sound events and their relation to the cultural and political life-worlds (Lebenswelt) of Singapore/ans. The second section argues for an importance of archiving sounds in/of Singapore given the absence of any authoritative sound library or sound map. Many iconic, culturally defining sounds are now lost to time; this loss further underscores the importance of archiving for past sounds and the perception of these sounds by historical actors inform us about the changing character and identity of cities, people and cultural practices. Technology today provides the means to capture and contain sound, as ephemeral phenomena, in high fidelity and this paper will include a discussion of an ongoing research project in collaboration with the National Archives of Singapore (SoundscapeSG) which involves a web-based platform that contains Singapore soundscapes in ambisonic formats.