ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN SINGAPORE: NEGOTIATING ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Abstract

Environmental education (EE) is pivotal in nurturing our environmental responsibilities. As EE has been incorporated into multiple disciplines in Singapore, a body of research has emerged, but current studies fail to interrogate whether EE has fulfilled its purpose in developing students’ environmental responsibilities. Thus, my thesis bridges this research gap by examining how students negotiate their environmental responsibilities through EE in the Upper Secondary Geographical Curriculum (USGC). In order to do so, I reconcile concepts relating to place attachment, geographies of responsibility and global care ethics. Firstly, I use Relph’s insideness-outsideness concept (1976) to identify places that invoke a sense of responsibility. Then, establishing the understanding that some places invoke a sense of responsibility more than others thus becomes a mooring point to analysing how students extend their relational groundedness (Massey, 2004) and care for the ‘distant others’ (Lawson, 2007). Subsequently, through quantitative-phenomenology and straight observations, I investigate how students negotiate their environmental responsibilities differently in the classroom and the outdoors, and unveil the limitations that teachers face on the ground. My findings reveal that students’ vicarious encounters with global environmental problems in the USGC have produced an inordinate imaginative gap, thereby failing to imbue responsibility for the ‘distant others’. Although teachers can help to bridge this gap, stresses of curricular demands reduce their abilities to do so. The result is thus a collective sense of dispassionate outsideness towards the environment. While outdoor field trips help to augment the shortcomings of the USGC by bridging that imaginative gap and promoting a sense of empathetic insideness towards the environment, these field trips have remained scant as teachers contest for time after curricular hours. Hence, I conclude my thesis by asserting the need for a simultaneous development of students’ responsibilities towards both the local and the global environment.