Yang, Peidong

In a globalized world with increasing international migration and encounters of difference, education is presented with new challenges and opportunities regarding diversity, including teacher diversity. This paper focuses on teachers with immigrant backgrounds and explores how they potentially add constructive diversity to the receiving country’s education system. The empirical setting of this paper is Singapore, an Asian city-state seldom featured in teacher diversity research. Drawing from a broader study involving online surveys and qualitative interviews, this article examines the discourses of five immigrant teachers chosen for their insightful perspectives. We found that the teachers consciously engaged their foreigner/outsider identities by drawing on their biographical and educational backgrounds; they sought to add value to aspects of the Singapore school system which they perceived to be lacking, while negotiating with dominant values and teaching practices. Their negotiations, however, remain delimited in significant ways. The paper argues that immigrant teachers represent an undertapped and underappreciated resource for greater educational diversity in Singapore and beyond.

Inquiry-based learning has gained prominence in secondary-school humanities education in Singapore in recent years. In Social Studies (SS), the loci of inquiry learning are “Issue Investigation” as found in the 2016 Express and Normal (Academic) syllabus and “Performance Task” in the 2014/15 Normal (Technical) syllabus, respectively. Due to the relatively short time inquiry has been given explicit emphasis, to date research into this new aspect of SS education remains very limited. This paper focuses on an important yet often neglected step of the SS inquiry process—the development of inquiry questions. To explore how different ways of crafting the SS inquiry question may lead to distinct inquiry approaches and processes, a taxonomy of SS inquiry questions is proposed based on empirical observations. The taxonomy comprises three categories of questions: the “politician’s question”, the “social worker’s question”, and the “social scientist’s question”. The implications and applications of this taxonomy for SS instruction are also discussed with reference to the multifaceted aims of SS education in Singapore.

The COVID-19 pandemic, by causing disruptions to the temporalities and spatialities of international student mobility on a scale previously unimaginable, triggered heightened emotional reactions from international students. In this chapter, we examine and comment upon the emotional turmoil experienced by four international students amidst the pandemic as witnessed in their “letters to the coronavirus”. By unpacking and analyzing the narratives of these four differently situated international students, we shed light into how they have navigated—each in their own ways—educational desire and despondency, familial and social disconnectedness, and sometimes senses of self-doubt and disillusionment. We also draw attention to their coping strategies, in particular their exercise of emotional labor which involved heroic acts of resilience, hope, and optimism in the face of great adversity. Ultimately, we argue that both the emotional experiences of international students and their ways of emotional coping are topics worthy of greater attention in future research on international student mobility.

The upper-secondary Social Studies (SS) syllabus (Express/Normal-Academic) released in Singapore in 2016 introduced an inquiry-based component called “Issue Investigation” (II). Given the relatively recent nature of this introduction, so far there has been little research on II. Drawing on a small qualitative study, this article reports on some of the typical challenges experienced by Singapore SS teachers in implementing and enacting II, as well as the coping strategies they developed. According to these teachers’ accounts, II was from the outset hindered by an exam-driven pragmatic attitude prevalent in Singapore schools; whereas specific enactment challenges included the II’s (perceived) overwhelming scope and depth, time constraints, and deficits of certain skills or preparedness among students and teachers. Faced with these challenges, teachers developed broadly two types of coping strategies—simplification and “piggybacking”—to tame II by making it manageable, both for the students and for themselves.

Existing migration research has framed ‘middling migrants’ mainly in terms of transnational fluidity and flexibility, thus overlooking the issue of integration. This article adds to a burgeoning scholarship advocating a more locally embedded perspective (e.g. Meier, 2015b. Migrant Professionals in the City: Local Encounters, Identities, and Inequalities. New York and London: Routledge) by investigating the integration of immigrant teachers working in mainstream primary and secondary schools in the Asian city–state of Singapore. It is found that these immigrant teachers faced differentiated formal inclusion with respect to legal settlement, whereas their professional integration experiences also diverged between those who embodied certain ‘mainstream’ characteristics and those who did not. In negotiating professional integration, ‘non-mainstream’ immigrant teachers adopted a spectrum of strategies, but on the whole prioritised the pragmatic imperative to ‘fit in’, resulting in what may be termed muted diversification. In terms of broader ethnic and migration scholarship, this account serves to highlight the ways in which locally specific institutional and sociocultural conditions differentially shape middling migrants’ experiences in respect to settlement and work. With regard to the Singaporean context, this article fills an empirical gap in migration research while also reflecting on the accommodation and management of diversity in education.

The global landscape of higher education is an uneven field where players like nation-states are placed in hierarchical and centre-periphery relations. This paper focuses on the global field of international student mobility (ISM) and investigates China’s place in the field using an analytical framework consisting of three key categories of ‘capital’: economic, human, and symbolic. Drawing on existing scholarship and author’s first-hand ethnographic research, the paper examines the case of China as both a source and a destination of ISM, and analyses the flows and accrual of these three forms of capital as consequences of outbound and inbound student mobilities. Analyses show that in a global ISM field characterised by asymmetries and inequalities, China’s place is arguably semi-peripheral economically and symbolically. It is argued that this country-focused macro perspective complements existing ISM scholarship’s emphasis on social reproduction at individual and private levels.

Scholarship to-date agrees that the internet has weakened the Chinese party-state’s ideological and discursive hegemony over society. In this paper, we document a recent intervention into public discourse exercised by the Chinese state through appropriating and promoting a popular online catchphrase—“positive energy” (zheng nengliang). Analyzing the “positive energy” phenomena using Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of hegemony and discourse, we argue that the relative effectiveness of this hegemonic intervention rests on the semantic versatility of “positive energy”, which enables “chains of equivalence” to be established between the label’s popular meanings on the one hand and its propagandist meanings on the other.

Today, Inquiry-based Learning (IBL) is a powerful imperative in educational practice and a notable area of educational research. Past research has found IBL to be more effective than traditional/conventional classroom instruction strategies, but most evidence came from research on science instruction. In comparison, IBL in the social science and humanities subjects, particularly Social Studies (SS) education. appears to have been under-studied. This proposed study seeks to address this gap through investigating Singapore secondary school teachers' experiences with Issue Investigation the IBL component in the local SS syllabus. In Singapore, the emphasis on inquiry in SS is relatively new, and thus there is so far little research on this topic. Specifically, this study seeks to reveal how Issue Investigation is currently understood by SS teachers, with regard to its underlying rationale, purpose, and its relation to the rest of the SS syllabus. The study also aims to find out and analyse SS teachers' varied experiences of implementing Issue Investigation in their schools/classrooms, with a view towards identifying the characteristics of and possible contributing factors to successful/positive experiences as well as problematic/negative experiences. Through achieving these research objectives, the study ultimately seeks to use its findings to further support Singapore teachers in making more effective use of Issue Investigation as a powerful pedagogy, and to lay the groundwork for more systematic and in-depth research on inquiry-based SS in Singapore. In line with the stated research objectives, a qualitative research approach is proposed. Qualitative data will be collected chiefly through interviews and focus-group discussions (FGD) with SS teachers, Subject Heads, and Heads of Departments in secondary schools in Singapore, supplemented by collection of relevant documentary data and/or artefacts. It is estimated that up to 15 teachers from up to 5 schools will be involved in this study.