Shirlena HUANG, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Menusha DE SILVA, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore
This paper focuses on how feminist pedagogies were brought into the teaching of a first-year general education module (Changing Landscapes of Singapore) based in Geography. As feminist geographers co-teaching the module together for the first time as an online module because of the Covid-19 pandemic, we saw it as a space to shape the way the students think more reflexively about social relations of power and difference, as well as issues of inclusion and exclusion, in a way that involved dialogue, discussion and self-discovery, with us facilitating reflexive learning rather than simply providing knowledge (Gilmartin, 2002). The paper discusses two primary ways we did this. First, through tutorials that incorporated role-playing and policy recommendations, drawing on both internet sources and personal online interviews, students were encouraged to think more about the competing positions, power and politics of the multiple groups involved in deciding on and utilising Singapore’s limited land. Second, though assignments around a virtual field trip focusing on a minority community within Singapore, students were challenged to interrogate state-sanctioned racial categories that have invisibilised certain minorities within society. By “focusing attention on the micro-scale of the everyday”, we hoped to bring students’ attention to “less-included voices” (Carte & Torres, 2014: 1269) and enhance their appreciation of the situation of groups outside their everyday comfort zones and lives (e.g. in terms of age, ethnicity, and religion). In the paper, we reflect on the assumptions we brought to teaching the module and the extent to which these methods were successful at encouraging active student-centred learning and the development of student’s affective skills and sensibilities to “bridge the gap between academic knowledge and everyday life” which, as Maddrell (1994: 161) long ago recognised, “is central to an empowering education”.
Mots clés : feminist pedagogies|reflexivity|role-playing|virtual fieldtrips|student-centred learning
A103478SH