So finally back home and as you can see a distinct lack of motivation over the past week. I am now recovering and feel ready to get back to work and to finish off the story of my summer.
My final week in Singapore was really enjoyable. I had meetings at NIE and was invited to be an unpaid research assistant for the day by one of the Professors which was great. The research is quite comprehensive focussing on Citizenship Education in Singapore with a survey to provide quantitative data and a follow up series of interview questions for small samples. The research team have targeted 19 schools of all different types and the sample of pupils are 15 year olds. The survey is designed to gather information about citizenship-related perceptions and attitudes and the interviews are an opportunity to go into more depth around two topics, civic participation and engagement and civic knowledge, skills, perceptions and attitudes.
It was a really hot afternoon when I met the rest of the research team in the school office. Most of them are students helping out and they all managed to get into the school without any of the usual security. I had to leave my European Health Card with the security guard because yet again we had discussions about why I didn’t have an identity card. The school was huge, 1700 girls and we were going to see 4 classes. The numbers for the survey will give some really interesting results I think. It was founders day at the school so there was already a lot of excitement. The girls took a long time to settle down to the survey which is quite comprehensive with 20 pages of tick box questions. They are not all the same format though so it takes some concentration and thought to answer them all. After the survey a number of girls stayed behind to answer the interview questions. For me it was fascinating. There were questions about democracy and rights and responsibilities which my students answered quite clearly but started to get really confused on the comparative questions like whether or not other countries enjoyed similar rights and responsibilites to Singapore. Examples given as suggestions were the UK and China for comparative questions and the answers were quite revealing. There was also real confusion about the difference between the term meritocracy and democracy but they did think that the Singaporean government had done well and that it was over all doing a good job. One of the students told me that other countries were not multicultural like Singapore so her estimation of the success of the government was that they didn’t suffer from conflict like other countries did.
I would like to follow up on the research and it would be great to do a similar evaluative exercise in Scottish schools. That was my final task before hanging around for a delayed flight home and the inevitable chaos that is unpacking and trying to get back to some kind of normality. I still have photographs to finish downloading and books and papers to finish reading and ultimately a report to write and presentation to give so not quite over yet. Pulling everything together is going to be much easier with the blog. I’m really glad I kept up with it despite it being a challenge at times. I will post my final presentation up when done which now means that I have to get on and do it. I should also change the header to give it a more Scottish flavour.
