Michael Tan | National Institute of Education (original) (raw)

Papers by Michael Tan

Scaling up ICT-based Innovations in Schools, 2021

Education in the 21st Century, 2021

Makerspaces, Innovation and Science Education, 2021

While here is ample research on how youth are connected in online spaces and how youth participat... more While here is ample research on how youth are connected in online spaces and how youth participate online via sharing and reviewing artifacts, yet less is known about how these social connections and contributions emerge, especially in the context of physical making and what can they contribute to learning and assessment. Thus, our symposium primarily addresses two questions: (1) How do youth connect and learn in online maker communities? and (2) How can we design online maker tools for learning in and out of schools? We share efforts examining how sharing artifacts, documenting design processes, and providing feedback via online tools can support young makers in creating physical artifacts and offer insights to new assessment models.

This symposium proposes a genre of learning designs called Student-Generated Ideas (SGIs), based ... more This symposium proposes a genre of learning designs called Student-Generated Ideas (SGIs), based on designing learning contexts that promote students as critical producers, distributors, and consumers of knowledge. SGIs place students’ ideas at the center of learning designs, considering the learning process as well as the learning goals/outcomes. By soliciting and foregrounding students’ diversified ideas in the classroom and beyond, the learning environment communicates to students that their ideas matter to others and that they have a position of responsibility to their own and their peers’ learning processes. The notion of SGIs is embodied in a repertoire of studies at the Learning Sciences Lab, National Institute of Education, Singapore, that offer varied yet overlapping interpretations of how student ideas can inform the design of learning contexts. In sharing the core design principles for SGIs approaches, this work contributes important components to the learning sciences di...

Encyclopedia of Education and Information Technologies, 2019

Critical Issues and Bold Visions for Science Education, 2018

Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 2020

ABSTRACT This article considers the future of STEM education in Singapore, with implications for ... more ABSTRACT This article considers the future of STEM education in Singapore, with implications for comparable schooling systems. The Thinking Schools Learning Nation (TSLN) interventions since 1997 brought changes to science education ostensibly for economic competitiveness, the results of which can only become visible in international comparisons in this decade. I propose that TSLN represents a trade between some sacred cows of public schooling in exchange for magic beans, and I assess how well these beans have grown. In terms of economically productive creativity, the metrics present a mixed picture. Three problems that may have been overlooked could have contributed to this outcome: (i) misunderstanding the role of culture in artefact creation and use; (ii) a rational, deficit model for education; and (iii) an underestimation of the complexity of educating for economic goals. To attend to these issues, I propose a holistic vision of a STEM curriculum that recognises the social sciences of STEM as a legitimate concern for STEM educators, and a humanistic pedagogy that eschews deficit models for education. Such a vision recovers the value of the ‘useless’ knowledges of the humanities in STEM education, and approaches instruction with an intention towards enabling students to respond to unforeseeable futures.

Cultural Studies of Science Education, 2020

Journal of Science Education and Technology, 2018

When considering science education within the makerspace (engineering workshop) context, insuffic... more When considering science education within the makerspace (engineering workshop) context, insufficient attention may be paid to the cultural models organising the learning activity in such spaces. Too often, learning is imagined to be orchestrated by instructors, and students are supposed to passively respond to activities and events planned on their behalf; even when constructivist approaches are considered, curriculum goals are seldom negotiated, let alone led by student interests. We report on a case study of school which designed a learning organisation around a makerspace, built upon a hacker model of learning. Here, we used the benign version of hack, meaning to reverse-and creatively engineer devices to suit one's goals. While it may appear that less 'teaching' is required, the tasks required to effectively remove the supports, and yet achieve learning, are non-trivial indeed. We found three practices that defined such a space: (i) a significant ludic component, (ii) highly authentic scientific practices, and (iii) attention to tacit knowledges in learning the practices of science. We argue that the mythologies surrounding the hacker stereotype have made an impartial consideration of hacking difficult, and that one effective way of using makerspaces for science instruction can be based on a reimagined set of goals for science. Specifically, attention needs to be paid towards the performative aspects of scientific knowledge in addition to competence in the representations of science. Keywords Makerspaces. Hackers. Cultural design. Learning environments. STEM education Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself.-Jean Piaget, 1972 Paradoxically, memorization and the respect for authorities such as the classics may be a better way to teach students to think critically and creatively than the common practice of critical and creative thinking in the West (in the US in particular): what the latter actually encourages is students' venting their received opinions or frivolous ideas while mastering a classic may help students to transcend their narcissism and myopia and to have something worth rebelling against.-Tongdong Bai, 2011

Teaching and Teacher Education, 2019

h i g h l i g h t s Reports on the culturally relevant pedagogic practices of a case study of Sin... more h i g h l i g h t s Reports on the culturally relevant pedagogic practices of a case study of Singapore teachers. Offers an analytic framework to describe practices of culturally relevant pedagogy. Demonstrates the cultural struggles over pedagogy and pedagogical forms. Identifies ways teachers can relate their teaching to students' backgrounds.

Learning: Research and Practice, 2018

The STEM movement is a recent phenomenon receiving worldwide attention as the darling educational... more The STEM movement is a recent phenomenon receiving worldwide attention as the darling educational project for school systems and research centres. This interest has no doubt been fuelled by economic rationales of the supposed necessity of STEM for continued material wealth, and the claims that the future will require a different sort of expertise than what we currently possess. However, not as a conservative response, but as a critical one, it is important for us to become clearer about what it is that we would want students to learn. In addition, as researchers and practitioners, it is imperative that we distinguish hype from reality, if only because we need to learn from our collective institutional histories and claim some form of ownership over the direction of our work. Interdisciplinary STEM education does provide opportunities for educators to deeply confront such issues as the ethics of invention, and the distinction between the descriptive and normative disciplines. Yet, these gains are likely to be drowned out by the much louder clamour for flashy new things to fill new rooms with rearranged furniture. This commentary is intended as a reminder to the community to do the hard, unglamorous work required to make worthwhile learning happen.

Learning: Research and Practice, 2015

Given our current state of knowledge about ourselves and the natural world we inhabit, it is temp... more Given our current state of knowledge about ourselves and the natural world we inhabit, it is tempting to think that we know very well how we learn, or to contemplate, in the first place, learning as a phenomena is of any interest. Yet, now, more than ever, we find ourselves needing to know more about learning, if only for the mundane reason that the glut of information is not knowledge, and people need to learn how to distinguish between the two. More than that, we believe that the industrial model of education has reached an interesting location where the information revolution has swept away the old raison d’être of instructing learners in knowing that, to now consider instruction in knowing how. The foregoing is certainly not new. Yet if we consider the ways in which we have tried to rethink instruction and learning, we believe there can always be room for a greater diversity of theories and approaches. For instance – what roles do bodily dispositions play in learning? What do advances in cognitive and neuroscientific research have to inform us about learning? How do we manage emergence from “lower level” mechanisms to higher level phenomena? How do we marshal trans-disciplinary, trans-methodological evidence sources to understand learning? What are some implications for instruction given what we know about learning? How well do theories travel beyond their contexts of generation? Are there cultural idiosyncrasies to learning, and what may be the implications for “universal” theories? In some fields in the humanities and social sciences, a recurring rhetorical strategy has been that of the radical break, declaring what came before to no longer be of relevance, and that henceforth a new paradigm is the only valid means of thinking about particular phenomena. To be clear, while there are definitive circumstances where this approach may be valid, we empathically assert that we are not a journal of newness for its own sake – we ground ourselves deeply in the intellectual history of the field, and desire to curate novelty only where contribution to thinking about current problems exist. When we were thinking of our journal title, we wanted to be clear that we are not just about theoretical advance. It is perhaps a universal situation that the ivory towered academic no longer exists, and that the social and ethical responsibility exists for researchers to translate theoretical advance to positively influence teaching and learning across the entire spectrum of student abilities. Hence, our subtitle Research and Practice reflects our ambition to feature articles across two broad areas of need: to advance the state of our knowledge in new ways of thinking about persistent problems of learning, and also new practical advances in the complexity and ambiguity of the realities in which we have to operate in. In this inaugural issue of the journal, we are proud to have a line-up of articles which reflect our thinking about the exciting times we occupy in the field of the science of learning. Mitchell Nathan and Chelsea Martinez open this issue with the empirical findings of a study of embodied cognition. Quickly becoming an important perspective Learning: Research and Practice, 2015 Vol. 1, No. 1, 1–3, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23735082.2015.1015944

Responses Please consider writing a response to this paper in the WePaste forum for JASTE 1.1 (ww... more Responses Please consider writing a response to this paper in the WePaste forum for JASTE 1.1 (www.wepaste.org). Abstract Science and technology education has been taught as a neutral and technical subject in, abstract, contextless ways. This state of affairs is not tenable, especially for one who is aware of the controversies surrounding the uses and abuses of science. In this paper, I argue that environmental education should be a topic that science educators teach, and review some of the obstacles and challenges surrounding socially responsible (science) education, with environmental education as an example. Place based education is proposed as a means through which some of these challenges can be faced; and I conclude with some general comments about education.

Learning: Research and Practice

While recent research trends in science education have focussed the collective attention at utili... more While recent research trends in science education have focussed the collective attention at utilizing the science curriculum as a means towards positive social change, such efforts have largely been predicated on understandings of the nature of knowledge and truth as socially constructed entities. Through this lens of social constructivism, knowledge is said to bear the signature of individuals and institutions in power, and therefore extant knowledge is considered to be the vehicle for further oppression of disadvantaged groups. There are at least two ways in which this argument is deeply flawed-social constructivism accords to itself epistemic positions it denies others, and an intellectually honest application of its principles leads to a position where there is no way to distinguish between better or worse positions on issues. In contrast, the principle of social realism takes a 'middle path', acknowledging the social reality of knowledge construction but disavowing the relativism of social constructivism. Through this epistemological foundation, implications arise for curriculum theory-how is it that we may discriminate forms of knowledge for in/ex-clusion into the school curriculum? In this study, I consider the curriculum changes in the Ontario elementary science anxd technology curriculum. I ask two key questions: (i) What are the effects of the curriculum revisions on the knowledge content of the science curriculum? and: (ii) What are the -ii -characteristics of science pedagogy in fulfilment of these curriculum changes? I develop instruments to analyze curriculum documentation, and classroom pedagogy. The major findings of this project include: (i) the curriculum revisions have added environmental knowledge expectations with varying degrees of disconnection from the scientific content knowledge; (ii) knowledge expectations removed to accommodate environmental expectations constituted important scientific principles; (iii) environmental pedagogy in science classrooms reflected the disconnection between science and environmental knowledge, most obviously in the upper grades where the degree of boundary maintenance between knowledge forms was strongest; (iv) this disconnection between environmental and scientific knowledge forms inhibited the cumulative modality of knowledge (re)production. A discussion of results and the general principles of the importance of knowledge concludes the project.