Choo, Suzanne S.

While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim, in this paper, is to propose a re-envisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex, connected, and contested global sphere.

The shift in multimodality and multiliteracies in the English curriculum has become more a need than a choice. With the advent of ‘new’ media and advancing technology, learning scopes have broadened significantly. Methodologies and pedagogies will have to be redefined and re-established to accommodate the over-flowing sources of accessible knowledge. The main issue is that schools and universities, as Hull and Nelson (2005) argued, are still “staunchly logocentric, book centered, and essay driven” (p.225). More than a decade after this assertion, these new forms of literacies appear to have some impact on teaching and learning. However, the inclusion of multimodal text analyses in school-based assessment seems to be lagging. This paper discusses the shift towards multimodality and multiliteracies and their possible impact and implications on the English curriculum. It proposes the alignment of a re-conceptualized English curriculum which infuses the teaching and learning of visuals and technology and the assessment of multimodal texts.

Once regarded as the most essential subject in the national curriculum vital for civilizing the public, English Literature has now lost its place of prominence. In this paper, I focus on Singapore where the subject was a core aspect of the colonial curriculum and where it is currently facing declining enrolment at the national examinations. In the first part of the paper, I discuss how Literature initially functioned to propagate colonial values education in Singapore and how, following Singapore's independence, its goals were overtaken by a nation-state model of values education. Limitations of this model provide the grounds for a transnational model of critical values education that, as I argue in the second part, may be powerfully conveyed through Literature. It is Literature’s capacity to facilitate transnational critical engagements with values and explorations of identity especially involving highly sensitive aspects related to gender, race, and religion that represents the strongest justification in the light of its present demise. What Literature offers is the possibility of engaging with values beyond the confines of Empire or nation by grappling with essential questions about what it means to be a cosmopolitan as opposed to a nationalistic citizen inhabiting the world.

Countering the drive to erect walls between nations and communities, the burden is increasingly on educators to develop in students essential skills and dispositions for a more hospitable future. Global education is essentially aimed at addressing the realities of increasingly networked societies and porous exchanges of knowledge, capital, and products among people and groups around the world. This paper examines how global education is enacted in two schools in Singapore and the United States. Given that a central characteristic of the twenty-first century is globalization, global education is inevitably embedded in the discourse of twenty-first century competencies utilized by policymakers worldwide. However, while global education has typically been studied as a singular subject such as Human Rights or integrated into History, Social Studies, or Civics Education, this study differs as it examines two schools that have adopted a whole-school approach to global education. That is, global education is embedded in the culture of schooling and infused across curricula subjects. The first part of the paper provides an overview of global education and its two key emphases – globalism and global citizenship. The second part discusses the tensions emerging from observations of global education in the two schools.