Adele Seah Pei Jia (National Institute of Education (Singapore))

Keywords
Primary Social Studies
Primary School

Multicultural Education (ME) teaches learners to overcome differences in areas like culture, ethnicity, and social class. By equipping learners with the cultural knowledge, skills and dispositions to embrace diversity, ME enables individuals to navigate an increasingly complex world. Given the limited local research on ME, this paper examines how elements of ME have been incorporated into the 2020 Primary Social Studies (PSS) curriculum in Singapore. The study revealed that the PSS curriculum comprises a wide variety of multicultural elements. At lower primary, these elements focus on building personal and cultural knowledge. In contrast, at upper primary, such elements are introduced as mainstream academic knowledge. The study further found that the PSS curriculum adopts a contributions and additive approach to implementing ME. However, Singapore’s unique ideology of multiracialism also influences the PSS curriculum, placing PSS in tension with social action and transformative approaches to ME. The implications of these findings on teaching and learning are discussed.

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