Yeo, Dennis Kah Sin

2024, Loh, Jason Kok Khiang, Kiren Kaur Ratan Singh, Yeo, Dennis Kah Sin

The Inspiring Teacher of English Award and the President’s Award for Teachers are national awards that recognize outstanding Singapore educators. This paper delves into the practices and philosophies of six award-winning teachers, unravelling the intricacies that distinguish their pedagogical approaches. The study is centred around three pivotal themes: Student-centred instructional approach, Optimization of Curriculum Materials, and Heart for students. The teaching philosophy undergirds and informs the other two themes, providing the guiding principles that ensure a consistent, student-centred, and resource-effective approach in the classroom. Highlighting the adaptability of these educators in tailoring their methods to individual student needs, the paper emphasizes the significance of a sound educational philosophy as their guiding principle. Furthermore, it explores the adept integration of curriculum materials in their teaching. This analysis offers valuable insights into the unique qualities and teaching methodologies that contribute to the success of award-winning teachers, providing a nuanced understanding of their contribution to educational excellence. Additionally, this analysis suggests significant implications for teacher education and in-service professional development, highlighting the need for programmes that foster these key attributes and approaches, thereby enhancing teacher effectiveness and student learning outcomes across educational settings.

2024, Yeo, Dennis Kah Sin

The ghost raises fundamental questions of reality, identity and epistemology. The ghost is the shadow image of otherness that threatens our notions of life, humanity and permanence by intimating that if death is permanent and the afterlife eternal, then perhaps it is our present tangible reality that is the simulacrum. The ghost interrogates the quotidian, not vice versa. The fetishization, aesthesizing and ritualizing of death in the Gothic aims consistently to defer the final definitive ending of death and the state of non-existence. As a memento mori, ghosts remind us that our ruminations of death are not morbid, but life-affirming. This article will explore the depiction of the afterlife in The Others (Amenábar 2001) in which the living are simulations of the dead and vice versa. Unlike the typical horror movie, the predominant discourse of The Others is a postmodern interrogation of belief, truth and doctrine. The haunted house is an in-between land of purgatory, a death space of self-loss and separation that plays out in the conflict between religion and the supernatural. The questions with which the films ends – ‘What does all this mean? Where are we?’ – is not just a geographical question, but an ontological one. The interrogation of Biblical narratives causes the audience to evaluate the reliability of the discourse of established religion and its doctrine of the afterlife. By defying audience expectations of the generic conventions of the ghost story, the movie relies on the viewer’s faith that what we see on-screen is real, when this cinematic reality is as deceptive as seeing dead people artificially propped up to appear alive. Suspended between being and nothingness, both absent and present, the ghost is a metaphor for the simulacrum of film. The cinematic thus serves as the Other by which the real can be defined.