The relevance of biological knowledge for citizenship: A Singapore perspective
Biological knowledge for citizenship rests at the nexus of two important concepts -scientific literacy and citizenship education. Scientific literacy, the ability to make sense of and hence decisions related to scientific issues, operates under the broad construct of citizenship. Citizenship education is defined by UNESCO as "educating children, from early childhood, to become clear-thinking and enlightened citizens who participate in decisions concerning society". As society moves further into the 21st century, many of the challenges facing 'sustainable societies' require scientifically literate citizens to participate at multiple societal levels. At the international level, many of the UN Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the world community have a scientific grounding in biology. This suggests that global citizenship education must take cognizance of biological knowledge. Through the theoretical lens of scientific literacy, pressing biological issues of food security, nutrition, biodiversity decline, and climate change are discussed in the chapter, making explicit the importance of biological knowledge for responsible global citizenship. These issues affect citizens at the community and individual levels through decisions linked to matters like food waste, diet, body mass index, and choice of food. Various learning approaches have been used to incorporate these matters into science curricula, such as through real-world learning.
Uncovering Singapore teachers’ motivation to participate in professional development activities
Set against the motivation to enhance Teacher Professional Development (TPD), the question was raised of what makes a teacher want to engage in TPD. While a literature scan has shown numerous studies on TPD that advocate different types of TPD that teachers consider effective, the Singapore literature suffers from a dearth of empirical study to show what motivates a teacher to engage in TPD. Adopting a social psychology framework of the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study seeks to address the research problem through a baseline study and an extended exploration on the factors affecting a teacher's motivation to do TPD. A variety of data collection methods are described to study this. In-depth interview and questionnaire survey will be used to construct the baseline while observations and fieldwork will deepen the exploration and provide the triangulation to data collection, essentially improving the reliability of the study. This paper will report on the findings from the in-depth interviews and elucidate the reasons for teachers taking part in TPD in Singapore.
Tensions and dilemmas in teacher professional development
This paper presents the reasons why teachers engage in professional development as well as the tensions and dilemmas that arise from professional development. The voices of 14 teachers are heard through individual semi-structured interviews. The transcripts of the interviews were analysed using thematic coding to uncover the themes related to the tensions that teachers feel when they are faced with decisions pertaining to professional development matters. Three dilemmas surfaced from our analysis and in this paper, we present them in a dualistic manner to highlight the tensions that resulted from these dilemmas faced by the teachers. The first dilemma concerns the issue of needs that are served through engagement in professional development activities. Here we discuss whether professional development should serve the needs of individual teachers or whether it should serve organizational needs. We highlight the forms of professional development activities that teachers should engage in and how they often find themselves torn between the urge to attend professional development activities that they personally enjoy and those that their peers and school would like them to attend. The second dilemma is related to teachers’ sense of responsibility to their pupils when they are engaged in professional development activities. The question that teachers commonly ask themselves before they decide on professional development activities is whether their students' learning will be affected in their absence. The last dilemma is related to the first and it deals with whether professional development activities should be made compulsory or whether it should be voluntary for teachers. Understanding the tensions and dilemmas of professional development as experienced by teachers allows the policy makers and professional developers to make better decisions so that the fidelity of professional development policies and programs can be enhanced.