Azilawati Jamaludin

Identifying educational competencies for the 21st workplace is driven by the need to mitigate disparities between classroom learning and the requirements of workplace environments. Multiple descriptors of desired 21st century skill sets have been identified through various wide-scale studies (e.g., International Commission on Education for the 21st Century) and consistently within the context of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning, the ability to problem solve, particularly complex problem-solving, remains a crucial competency. In this paper, we look at how current contemporary spaces such as the immensely popular, massively multiplayer online role-playing game(MMORPG), World of Warcraft, (WoW) afford problem-solving skill acquisition in the context of Singaporean youth learners. Given that WoW exists as a contextual space with an overarching narrativized problem to be solved, our investigation focused on two important related constructs that underpin learners’ problem-solving trajectory—learning and identity becoming within contemporary domains of technology learning. We present findings of an ethnographic investigation of one youth gamer within the affinity spaces of WoW. Moving away from traditional mentalistic construals of problem-solving, our findings indicate that problem-solving within WoW may be characterized by a triadic-D model of domain, disquisitional, and discursive practices within self, social, and structural dialectics. Theoretical considerations for broadening the understanding of a situated and embodied notion of problem-solving and identity becoming within STEM learning are proposed.

In this chapter, we share the importance of partnerships among schools, families, and communities as a means for supporting students’ purposeful learning. Within the context of Singapore schools, we found that efforts to create and sustain school partnerships are not only facing accountability pressures arising from high stakes testing where discretionary time for public educators is a scarce and dwindling resource, but also by the need to innovate teaching and learning in response to the many demands of future uncertainties. In addressing the latter issues, we are clear that collaborative partnership work must be carefully designed to yield visible and valued benefits for mutual parties and, more importantly, to ensure that they are benefits to the school system. In this chapter, we describe the partnership design strategies that are embedded in the practical enactments of a school- based transformative education agenda in Singapore. Through a case example of a Singapore secondary school, we share a partnership model that focuses on not only empowering the school in terms of its development of school-based innovations leading to purposeful learning but also the scale and sustainability of these innovations beyond its initial context of development, to ‘partnering’ schools on these innovations that move towards life-long, life-wide, life-deep and life-wise learning. We also discuss future directions to empirically advance the empowering partnership model.

This paper explores the emotional realities of teaching educationally disadvantaged students between the ages of 7 and 8 in Singapore. Data was collected via semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 9 primary school Mathematics teachers and analysed using inductive, grounded theory approach and thematic analysis. From a Conservation of Resources theory lens, findings show that educationally disadvantaged students are far from a homogeneous group as there is great diversity in the sources of disadvantage and obstacles to learning, contributing to the emotional weight borne by teachers of educationally disadvantaged students. Possible recommendations are also discussed.

IASA, which stands for “Integrative Approach to Science Argumentation,” is a project that sought to augment the goals of science education by integrating scientific argumentation with conceptual learning within the lower secondary science curriculum. Bearing in mind the constraints that our science teachers might face within a content-packed syllabus, our team set out to develop a pedagogical model embedded with novel contextual tasks. These student tasks were aimed at developing argumentative skills, which encompassed data sense-making, evidence harnessing, options weighing, and reasoning and communicative skills, alongside content development. Multiple resources that constituted our IASA “toolkit” were developed over the course of the 2.5-year project to provide professional learning and support for science teachers keen in embarking on this pedagogical innovation. This chapter will outline the designs of our pedagogical model, digital platform, IASA toolkit, and professional learning model as well as explicate impact for students as an overview of the project’s conceptualization and implementation.

Grounded in our work on analysing teacher learning communities as they evolve from traditional learning epistemologies towards constructivist orientations and progressive, inquiry-driven pedagogies (Hung et al., J Interactive Learn Res 17:37–55, 2006; Hung et al., Educ Technol 55:20–26, 2015; Shaari et al., in press; Wu and Hung, Transforming learning, empowering learners: The international conference of the learning sciences (ICLS). International Society of the Learning Sciences, Singapore, vol 1, pp 474–481, 2016), this paper articulates teacher learning communities as catalytic levers for educational innovation in Singapore schools. We begin with an articulation of the characterizations of teacher learning communities within the Singapore education system—from those that organically emerge at the grassroots (teacher) level to those that were intentionally designed at the systems (ministry) level. While there has been growing recognition for networked learning of school faculties that engender results, which are meaningful and impactful at both the teacher and student level, the purported stance is that change towards innovation and progressive, inquiry-driven learning practices is not just a change in instructional strategies but also a fundamental change in teachers’ epistemologies. Through case examples of the developmental processes of a networked learning community within the system, we posit that apprenticeship-learning affordances of networked learning communities underpin teachers’ shifts in epistemology and function as proximal vehicles for catalyzing innovations through progressive, inquiry-driven pedagogies. These shifts are engendered through tenets of (i) growth intentionality, (ii) dialectics of structure-agency, design-emergence, periphery-centrality, and commonality-diversity, (iii) socio-technological leverages, and (iv) ecological coherence and alignments. Expanding our analysis both vertically (macro systems level to micro personal level) and horizontally (abstract cross-disciplines to concrete subject-specific affinities), we ground these theoretical ideas to a nuanced understanding of scalable epistemic learning, in the context of educational innovation and diffusion.

Issues of innovation diffusion and its related tractability in schools remain key challenges in education research. At the Office of Education Research in Singapore, the authors have been working to develop a research program leveraging upon a school cluster system with the view to experimenting on the centralization and decentralization structures of Singapore's education system to enable scaling or the diffusion of innovations to occur. They posit that underpinning the structural aspects of diffusion is the notion of apprenticeship learning among teachers for epistemic change to occur. In this article, they define and outline how epistemic learning can occur at the teachers' level, articulating how leaders can provide the necessary socio-technological infrastructure to spread and sustain epistemic shifts for pedagogical change. To this end, they explore the use of the cluster system as an alternative approach and a proximal vehicle to build teacher capacity and to promote epistemic change in a more optimal manner in the context of innovation diffusion in education.

People, especially teachers, make all the difference in educational change, with epistemic shifts in teachers being the highest leverage point for system change. Foregrounding the chapter with a non-objectivistic approach in learning sciences for education change, this concluding chapter postulates that the teacher is at the heart of the system and school change. While we can have a system and school improvement theories to guide us in the course of systemic change, the heart of teaching and learning reforms lies with the teacher. It will be the expert teacher who will be able to enable purposeful learning by our students where their learning will be more life-long, life-wide, life-deep and life-wise. With reiteration of the key concepts of ecological and apprenticing leadership via networked learning communities, the middle leadership of teacher- leaders is reinforced and serves as a powerful mechanism driving inside- out change within the system.

In this chapter, we examine how we can sustain educational innovations from the ecological perspective, where multiple stakeholders at the leadership level can help new adopters of innovations to construct an ecosystem that is conducive to deep learning. From our studies, we established that schools could sustain educational innovations to achieve purposeful learning by leveraging ecosystem carryover effects, which are defined by Ron Adner (2012) as the process of leveraging successful elements in constructing one ecosystem to create advantages in constructing a new ecosystem. We found four types of carryover effects that can occur in self-renewing learning networks that engender new knowledge, namely: structural, economic, socio-cultural and epistemic ecosystem carryover effects. For the rest of this chapter, we will explain how we had identified these carryover effects and provide preliminary evidence for the impact of these carryover effects in sustaining educational innovations that move towards achieving life-long, life-wide, life-deep and life-wise learning in the schools.

Learning is a complex phenomenon where a learner constitutes a system operating at neural, physiological, cognitive and social levels, with interactions between and across processes and levels, effecting neural to cognitive to social levels and vice versa. In tracing historical paradigms, theories of learning have been traditionally fragmented in nature, typically focusing on sub-process or sub–levels of the system. For example, theories of cognitivism focuses on internal processes and connections that take place during learning, negating observed behaviours or outward behaviours of learning, while theories of social constructivism place strong emphasis on human development and knowledge construction that is socially situated, with less attention paid to individual differences and variations. In recognizing inherently complex interrelated learning systems, a more integrated and comprehensive understanding of learning is necessary. Such an understanding entails research endeavours that can harness multiple, complex parameters of the learner system through mapping and understanding interactions between and across learning processes and levels. Such endeavours entail the use of multiple sources of scientific evidence, across multi-modal data capture modes and multi-levels of analyses, informed by multi-disciplinary theoretical framings. In this paper, we argue that an overarching scientific ethos towards learning optimizations need artful implementations of pedagogies and interventions that close the circle—from scientific findings translated into practical applications in education and back to addressing problems in education as impetus for evidence-informed theorizations of learning.