Hung, David

The paper presents a study on a partnership between schools, a community welfare organization, Science Centre and the National Institute of Education to design, study and implement new approaches of learning for lower track students. Singapore as an inclusive society has sought to address the diverse educational needs of children in the country. This partnership seeks to ignite students’ interest in learning Science and address the affective needs in learning, which includes developing students’ confidence, competence and social skills. Leveraging on the diverse expertise and experiences, the partners designed tinkering activities to anchor students’ learning experiences in exploring, testing and constructing Science ideas. The activities are designed and enacted with linkages to the existing Science curriculum. However, setting a partnership with stakeholders from different backgrounds and domains is challenging. We will describe the journey of setting up the partnership, developing shared goals, building capacity and knowledge, and designing for learning. Also, we will share students’ learning and affective outcomes because of the partnership and participation in the designed tinkering activities. Our goal is to highlight how meaningful partnerships can be formed to better understand and meet lower track students learning and affective needs through collective social responsibility according to the familiar proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”.

Purpose: Leadership for the implementation of an educational innovation in Singapore was examined by integrating distributed leadership with an ecological perspective of leadership and analysed using the third generation of cultural–historical activity theory. Research Method: The study adopted the naturalistic inquiry approach of a case study of a cluster of six elementary schools in the process of diffusing an educational innovation over one academic year. The research team observed six open classroom sessions and two review sessions at the cluster level. A total of two Ministry officers, one Master Teacher, 10 school leaders, 12 key personnel and 21 teachers were interviewed. Findings: The use of cultural–historical activity theory as an analytical lens provided insights into how different activity systems at the ministry, cluster, and school levels interact in providing leadership for the implementation of the innovation, the tools utilised, the rules/norms which enabled or constrained the innovation's implementation, and the evolving nature of the leadership provided. The study affirms the value of incorporating an integrative perspective in the analysis of leadership and the value of cultural–historical activity theory in unpacking the distribution of leadership across interrelated activity systems, and in highlighting the temporal evolutionary nature of leadership.

This article critically examines current conceptualisations of learner feedback agency (LFA) by juxtaposing them against debates and origins of agency to uncover their existing limitations. This examination found three limitations, portraying LFA as a static construct, overemphasising behavioural enactments over underlying deliberations, and presenting a unidirectional influence of structures on LFA. Responding to these limitations, the article proposes a three-fold re-conceptualisation of LFA as (1) situational, highlighting the adaptability of learners in dynamic learning environments, urging a shift from static to situation-specific considerations; (2) deliberative, underscoring the significance of examining learners’ thought processes beyond behavioural actions, and (3) entangled, recognising the co-constructive relationship between learners’ actions and existing structures, emphasising that learners not only respond to, but also influence structures in feedback. Implications of these perspectives are discussed, challenging prevailing assumptions and advocating for a more robust understanding of LFA.

In this paper, we discuss metacognition against a backdrop of 21st century traversals, where learners are constantly moving and interacting across different contexts. We describe how learners’ traversals are underpinned by triadic coupling relationships between self, social others, and cultural resources. Drawing our observations from contemporary contextual spaces of online games, we articulate how a situated and embodied form of metacognition pivots the dialectics of the aforementioned coupling relationships.

In the current milieu of technological advancements, we are increasingly witnessing how technologies such as wireless and telecommunications can be integrated and taken advantage of in the daily interactions of the classroom and beyond. In this paper, we illustrate in simple yet novel ways how these technologies, which would in our opinion be prevalent in the near future, can be possibly adopted for teaching and learning. A case example of a teaching and learning environment as designed and developed will be illustrated. This case example illustrates the applications of wireless and mobile handheld devices, video-based learning management systems, and a flexible environment which facilitates group work.

A noticeable surge in students’ widespread adoption of ChatGPT in the past year brought attention to the need for a deeper understanding of their interactions with this new technology. While attempts at theorising learner-ChatGPT interactions have been made, few studies offer empirical accounts of the interactions between learners and ChatGPT. This study aims to address this gap by utilising Emirbayer and Mische’s Choral Triad of Agency as an analytical framework to investigate secondary school students’ self-initiated interactions with ChatGPT in the context of historical inquiry. Through an in-depth examination of three cases, we unpacked three distinct types of learner-ChatGPT interactions—ChatGPT-as-historical source, ChatGPT-as-feedback, and principled non-use. Although students presented unique interaction patterns with ChatGPT, each case was found to have limited routined interactions with ChatGPT. Our analysis revealed that the students held static agentic orientations in their use of ChatGPT due to their limited experiences with ChatGPT and inadequate ideation for alternative ways of utilising it. Implications of this study propose the need for deliberate interventions to encourage students to have more diverse and meaningful interactions with ChatGPT.

This paper addresses how twenty-first century learning cultures can be enabled and spread in the Singapore school system by enacting curricular innovations and developing teachers’ capacity for adaptivity. We appropriate understandings of adaptivity, including adaptive expertise, and contextualize it to the Singapore school system at the socio-cultural level of analysis. Our focus is on the socio-cultural enablers mediated by curricular innovations that influence teachers’ learning of adaptivity. This socio-cultural perspective of teacher adaptivity is our contribution. The case study reveals that twenty-first century learning cultures and developing teachers’ adaptivity are enabled by: (1) school leadership creating socio-technological provisions for teacher experimentation and innovation; (2) learning contexts that re-orientate pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment; (3) learning communities that build teacher capacity; and (4) historicity for developing adaptivity. While enablers can be appropriated from this case study to show how teacher learning occurred within the school, the spreading of teacher adaptivity to other schools cannot be naively replicated. We discuss these issues and postulate that diffusing teacher adaptivity requires leadership and socio-cultural dimensions to enact a process of teacher learning across schools for practices to be diffused.

"This project is a case study of building communities of practice (CoPs) among Heads of Departments of Information Technology ((HOD(IT)s) in Singapore schools. As part of the second MasterPlan for Information Technologies in Schools initiated in 2002, there has been a stated goal to employ the CoP approach as a key strategic initiative to develop a more integrated "IT across the curriculum" approach in schools. As part of the same plan it was hoped that there would be a slowing changing pedagogical model that the learning environment might become more learner-centred through the effective integration of the technology. "-- [p. 1].