HSSE Online EDITORIAL

Cultivating multiple perspectives or different ways of seeing and thinking about the world is an essential aspect of humanities and social studies education. The articles in this issue provide different perspectives for readers to consider as lenses for understanding places, society, curriculum, politics, and others.

In the first article, Evangeline O. Katigbak offers the lenses of translocality and “worlding practices” to understand the geographies of place. She suggests place-based learning activities to help students interrogate everyday experiences in local sites and think about “being-in-the-world” as fundamental to geography and geographic education.

Hui Yang, Peidong Yang, and Shaohua Zhan use economic and demographic lenses for examining Singapore’s current immigration landscape and labor policies. Their article also explains “bottom-up” local reactions as well as “top-down” government policies to manage the opportunities and challenges Singapore faces in terms of economic development and demographic change.

The third article by J. Spencer Clark features the value of international videoconferencing and the sharing of perspectives between multi-ethnic and multi-faith secondary students from Macedonia and the United States. In his study, Clark examines the role of inquiry, public voice, audience, and positionality in discussing and understanding different values, attitudes, and beliefs about LGBTQ civil rights. Students in Clark’s study critically interrogate the often-pervasive role of silence that limits the ways students’ understand and publicly deliberate issues related to LGBTQ rights.

Johannis Auri Bin Abdul Aziz writes on Singapore’s upcoming presidential election and provides an overview of the different perspectives that seem to be at play in Singapore. The article surveys public opinion, research studies, and official views to identify controversies and different perspectives that seem to be central to the election.

The final article by Rabiah Angullia draws on multicultural and social semiotic theories to offer a critical perspective on how diversity and identity are treated in the Primary Two Social Studies curriculum. Through her examination of images and text in the readers used in the curriculum, Angullia finds that static and overly simplified representations of diversity and identity are offered that likely fail to help students think about pertinent issues that are central to diversity and identity, such as stereotyping, bias, the multiple facets of identity, and more meaningful social relations. 

Mark Baildon
Editor, HSSE Online
June 2017