Reflection on the Implemented Curriculum and its Representative Perspectives.

The implemented curriculum is representative of the perspectives through a well-designed syllabus that helps teachers like me scaffold student development. Through a series of classroom activities, life skills can be learned. These include critical inquiry and thinking skills from evaluating and interpreting information that requires students to make inferences, analyse evidence and compare and contrast views before making well-informed judgements. With further guidance from the teacher and together with the knowledge and understanding that comes with the acquisition of the above-mentioned skills, the right values and attitudes will also be instilled and students will grow into all-rounded citizens.

My idea of a good citizen will enable me to understand the bigger concept behind teaching the theme, managing international relations, which is to inform students of their role as a global citizen of the world and not restricted to being concerned with local issues. They need to understand the causes of conflicts among nations and also understand the role and relevance of regional and international organisations in terms of building diplomatic relationships, especially for a small country like Singapore. From here, it is important that students recognise that they can actively participate and contribute to our country’s peace and stability through a variety of methods. Such an understanding can be cultivated through interactive lessons and class discussions from which they constructively apply what they have learnt and get used to being vocal about their thoughts on national and global issues. In addition to that, such interactions will also allow students to be more mindful and sensitive to each other.

Social studies is current affairs. As such, there are definitely limitations to the printed textbook and only serves to be mainly informative with the underlying intention to inculcate values and skills. Therefore, I will be supplementing my lessons with materials from other sources such as the media, newspapers and even social networking sites. Students will then find the subject to be more relatable. For example, it is possible for me to hold a discussion on the recent territorial dispute between Japan and China over the ownership of the Senkaku or Diaoyu island with background information from newspaper articles like the Straits Times (http://www.straitstimes.com/the-big-story/asias-disputed-islands/story/asian-territory-disputes-could-trigger-war-panetta-201209) or evaluate the reliability of sources like videos on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uphmMnppCLY).

In order to implement this into the curriculum due to possible time constraints, students can be guided into doing more self-directed learning on certain sections of their textbooks through the use of worksheets to scaffold their learning and sources for the same sections can also be gathered and provided to them from external sources to further enhance their understanding.