Changing landscapes as text: Geography and national education in Singapore

Abstract

Textbooks are a repository for canonical material that serve as important guides for students as they embark on their journey of learning and discovery. In a discipline as varied as Geography, it is often challenging for authors to decide what to include. We negotiate these concerns as editors of a textbook for a course on Changing Landscapes of Singapore, which is taught primarily to non‐Geography majors who are required by the university to acquire knowledge about Singapore before they graduate. This paper discusses how textbook authors often balance a multiplicity of concerns that extend beyond disciplinary content. These concerns are situated within the broader context of how geographical education plays a key role in making student‐citizens critically aware of the trade‐offs in nation‐building projects and encouraged to apply geographical concepts to engage in active and informed public debates.

Weighting Research on the First-Class Curriculum Evaluation System of Landscape Architecture Based on the Analytic Network Process Method

“…e construction of teaching material resources is also one of the problems faced by the landscape architecture curriculum. For a long time, the teaching materials construction of the landscape architecture curriculum lags behind the curriculum construction and is far from keeping up with the speed of knowledge renewal [69]. e ANP method proposed by Saaty can solve the decision problems with complicated impact and feedback relationships, especially risk assessment, optimal resource allocation, and solution optimization [70,71].…”

Negotiating LGBTQ rights in Singapore: The margin as a place of refusal

“…For example, the Confucian ethos that informs the core values that are integral to Singapore's national identity is something that many of the students in the class would be familiar with. These are values that students learn about in social studies in high school as well as in tertiary institutions such as NUS under the Singapore Studies curriculum as part of National Education (NE) Programme (see Ramdas et al, 2018). According to Koh (2005: 80-82), NE is primarily designed for nation-building purposes and its overarching objective is to develop 'national cohesion' and 'a shared sense of nationhood', thus 'cultivating a sense of identity, pride and self-respect in Singaporeans as well as enable an in-depth understanding of the challenges, constraints and vulnerabilities confronting Singapore' (Ramdas et al, 2018: 51).…”

Geography textbooks, pedagogy and disciplinary traditions

“…Ramdas et al. () describe how the textbook they edited on Changing landscapes of Singapore relates to the relationship between the state and the National University of Singapore amid sometimes contradictory expectations about faculty and the university's international research visibility and their national educational roles. Nation‐building for a Singaporean postcolony only just into its first half‐century yields dilemmas in terms of what/whom disciplinary Geography and geographers serves there.…”

“…Our main focus here is on the UK case. Elsewhere, the story would be different, as some of the papers that follow, from Aotearoa/New Zealand (Murray & Overton, ), Singapore (Ramdas, Ho, & Woon, ) and the USA (Sparke, ; Warf, ), testify.…”