Silence and Sound
Nanyang Technological University English Graduate Research Symposium
4-5th October 2024
Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan (SHHK) Building
48 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639818
New Pedagogies
Day 2, 18 February | 4.45PM - 6.15PM
Moderator: Nah Dominic
Incubating Personal Histories in Singapore
Lim Yu Cong Darryl
Under Singapore's unique brand of meritocracy, the "ordinary" (Koh 11) Singaporean moves along narrowly-constructed paths towards rigid notions of success. Citizens are taught to "trust and obey" the state - "both political and educational leadership" (Chiong 159, emphasis in original) - for the right answers to success, and to work hard towards those answers. The LKY "triumphalist" (Koh 19) journey provides an ideal model, though it generalises what it means to move and remember as an ordinary Singaporean. My presentation proposes that Grotowski-inspired training processes can begin important historiographical work in Singapore, providing necessary time, space, and attention to the ordinary person.
Working individually with Singaporean youth participants, I introduced them to physical training exercises from Grotowski's work, while facilitating crucial discussions about their experiences with their imagination and body during the training. I argue that Grotowski-inspired training processes can help the ordinary Singaporean listen more attentively to their body, so that even as they move along the rigid paths structured by society, they can still engage in critical reflection and respond by making minute adjustments of their own, and in so doing, they begin to move and remember in a very personal way.
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Works Cited:
Chiong Charleen. 'The Texture and History of Singapore's Education Meritocracy'. Education in Singapore - People-
Making and Nation-Building. Ed. Yew-Jin Lee. Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore Ptd Ltd, 2022.
Koh, Ernest Wee Song. 'Ignoring 'History from Below': People's History in the Historiography of Singapore'. History
Compass: Vol. 5, No. 2, 23 November 2006, pp. 11-25.
Darryl Lim is currently a PhD student at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include Jerzy Grotowski in Asia, the state-citizen relation in Singapore, and the teacher-student relation, as well as the work on the self, in actor training. He is also the Artistic Director of Split Theatre, and his work at Split seeks to marry actor training with self-development, so that the self and the unthinkable can be given more value and prominence in Singapore.
Dialogic Displacements: Exploring Ethical Affordances and Tensions of an Online Collaborative Creative Writing Project
Nah Dominic
How can creative writing projects be harnessed in Literature education to embody the ethical relevance and practice of studying literary texts? Since the late 20th century, developments in ethically oriented Literature pedagogies have engaged students as active meaning-makers of ethical inquiries to cultivate an openness to others and sensitivity to (in)justice. Often, this is conducted through collaborative classroom discourse, individual literary criticism essays and/or personal responses to literary texts. Thus far, creative writing tasks in secondary Literature education have been designed as individual tasks focused on students’ aesthetic and personal engagement, or empathic responses of imagining an existing character’s perspective.
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Through a case study drawn from a larger co-designed Literature unit exploring Asian poetry enacted in 2019, this paper explores the affordances and tensions of collaborative creative writing tasks as modes of ethical engagement in Literature education. In this online collaboration conducted on Flock and Google Documents, 72 students from 3 upper secondary classes in 2 independent schools were assigned in 18 groups of 4 to co-write a poem with dialogic qualities in response to their areas of ethical interest. Students were also asked to submit a short documentation of their research process highlighting their decision-making and writing processes, as well as a critical commentary of their original poem detailing their vision and intended use of dialogic characteristics, language and literary devices. This collaboration culminated in a public reading of 8 shortlisted poems at the National Gallery of Singapore. This paper suggests pedagogical opportunities in combining creative and critical writing tasks, explores student resistance to collaborative creative writing tasks, while also proposing how the interpersonal tensions of collaborative creative writing can be explicitly reframed as productive opportunities to practice and embody ethical dispositions of empathy, hospitality and responsibility.
Nah Dominic is a PhD candidate at the English Language and Literature Academic Group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. For his doctoral thesis, he is examining student receptivity and resistance towards ethically oriented Literature pedagogies. Apart from Literature education and ethical criticism, his research interests extend to world literature and dramaturgy. He is the co-author of Teachers’ Guide to Sense and Sensitivity (2019) and How We Live Now: Study Companion (forthcoming, 2023), published by Ethos Books.
Community Arts and Identity: Counting on Participation
Carolyn Oei
Singapore’s National Arts Council sees the arts as a means of bringing people together, bridging diverse communities and strengthening social networks. In Our SG Arts Plan 2018-2022, Grace Fu, former Minister for Culture, Community and Youth, wrote, “[T]he arts play a critical role in building a more caring, cohesive and confident Singapore.” Individual artistic pursuits aside, these characteristics of caring, cohesion and confidence are fostered through activities that are known in many parts of the world as “community arts”. Yet, there is no official definition of the term in the Singaporean lexicon. Interestingly, it seems to have been replaced by “community engagement”. Does engagement require participation? What level of participation is required for it to qualify as engagement? Do these considerations even matter? They might if one asks whether and how activities like painting murals impact a person’s identity. This paper aims to make connections between literacy development and community arts by considering selected arts and cultural policies in Singapore as well as observations of programmes at a ground-up community arts centre. As a concept,
“identity” encapsulates what one does rather than what one has (Jenkins, 2014). As a literacy skill, it is a key component of citizenship as a practice and a characteristic that nation-states wish to foster in their people. Yet, national education and arts plans are largely driven by pragmatic and economic factors. As a creative function of civic space, community arts is an important corollary to quotidian forms of transaction that should exist beyond the formation of a national collective identity. My paper suggests a need to (a) define “community arts”, its parameters and purposes and (b) expand the community arts footprint by redefining and recognising the place and role of literacy in a more fundamental and programmatic fashion for the individual.
Carolyn Oei is an editor, arts manager and independent scholar. Her current research areas are community and participatory art and literacy development. Carolyn co-runs Mackerel, an independent online magazine dedicated to culture, literature and social commentary. Her current projects include a showcase she is producing with 3Pumpkins for the Esplanade’s March On 2023 programming, a podcast on anger and a creative non-fiction collection that explores uncertainty through food and cooking. Carolyn holds a Master of Education (English) from NTU.