Azilawati Jamaludin

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.

In this article, the authors discuss the importance of studying identity in the context of 21st century learning. Identity is an evolving trajectory that is always in-flux or changing. In a fast changing 21st century, educators are recognizing the significance of identity work, in particular projective ident1ty, as individuals participate in multiple roles. The purpose of this article is to formulate key tenets for the study of projective identity in the form of role-play(s) as youth-participants navigate different social and spatial affinity spaces, and to describe why it is important to 21st century learning.

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.

This article discusses peer apprenticeship learning (PAL) as situated within networked learning communities (NLCs). The context revolves around the diffusion of technologically-mediated learning in Singapore schools, where teachers begin to implement inquiry-oriented learning, consistent with 21st century learning, among students. As these schools have in past practices excelled in performance-driven pedagogies suitable for passing examinations, redesigning curricular resources, assessment, and pedagogical practices towards inquiry based learning was not insignificant. These teachers required convincing and also significant degrees of apprenticeship. The authors document PAL in action for teachers' epistemic change occurring within networks of teachers from across schools. The article delves into PAL processes, expanding the theory (see Hung, 1 999) beyond students to teachers and beyond dyad pairs to communities of teachers. Through PAL situated in NLCs, the article argues that epistemic learning can be diffused across schools, and is an appropriate scaling mechanism, seeing that teacher capacity to enact 21st century learning is key.

This paper reports the impact of using a structured argumentation board and enactive role play in Second Life on students' argumentative writing skills in the context of the A-level subject General Paper. Students were taught the structural aspects of argumentation based on Toulmin's (1958) argumentation framework. The structured argumentation board, Voices of Reason, supported their argumentation discourse while the Second Life platform supported students' contextualised role-playing activities on the topic of globalisation. Students participated in these two separate modes of technology-facilitated learning in a cyclic, interwoven fashion, alternating back and forth between two cycles of argument and enaction. Data in the form of argumentative essays were collected at the beginning and the end of a four week intervention period. We compare the pre and post intervention argumentation essays written by the students based on Toulmin’s argumentation framework, contrast the findings with that of the control group's argumentative essays, and present the statistical results in this paper.

Where the notion of education used to be (and still is) prevalently accepted as the teaching and learning within formalized settings, 21st century learners of today are developing highly sophisticated, and reflective literacies through participation and play with digital technologies. With the hybridization of learning with popular media culture, learners expect, and derive, little gratification from institutional contexts such as school. Such development implies an pressing need to understand the kinds of phenomena occurring in these so-called progressive (relative to current school practices) learnings and to consider the implications to present settings. Situating our study within the context of the extremely popular immersive multiplayer game space, World of Warcraft (WoW), this research is focused on the intertwining relationship between individual identity and the collective emergence and regulation of social communities within the activities transacted in the game and its related spaces. These issues are investigated in the informal learning space of online guild structures within WoW, while foregrounding central issues of identity and becoming that are core to contemporary media and literacies. The findings arising from this research are meant to inform design principles that will contribute to strongly coupled learning processes within both formal and informal contexts of learning.

Computer mediated communication (CMC) tools have marched into schools to provide borderless teaching and learning to complement existing face-to-face interactions. This article describes how teachers have used CMC to facilitate asynchronous online communication among students' collaborative project groups in project-based classrooms. Secondary school teachers used the CMC tool to facilitate and manage students' learning in terms of brainstorming and challenging student ideas, building resources, and working collaboratively to complete group projects.