1.1. Research rationale
As Ryan and Bohlin (1999) wrote, “Since education seeks to help students to develop as persons, character development is part and parcel of whole enterprise” (p. 93) and as Pring (2001) argued “education itself is a moral practice”, scholars attempt to bring across the point that a holistic education would have to incorporate both the intellectual and moral development to wholly develop a person. The Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) desired outcomes of education too emphasises the importance of the character and moral values of a person, other than the academic achievement. Under the Singapore education system, one should develop to become a confident person, self-directed learner, active contributor and concerned citizen (Ministry of Education Singapore, 2010a). Six core values of respect, responsibility, integrity, care, resilience and harmony underpin the educational framework for the aforementioned desired outcome of education and the development of the 21st century skills, such as critical and creative thinking, information and communication skills, global awareness and civics literacy (Ministry of Education Singapore, 2010a). These values are crafted in the Civil and Moral Education (CME) syllabus and explicitly taught to students during the CME lessons in the primary schools.
However, parents had pointed out in the newspapers that non-core subjects, like Social Studies, Health education and CME, had taken a backseat to the examinable subjects in school as the examinable subjects were deemed as more important and crucial by teachers (Chua, 2010). Another news article commented that young people nowadays were less fearful of breaking rules and social conventions as parents failed to prohibit the misbehaviour of their children and teachers in schools were less willing to discipline the students for the fear of parents’ complaint and students’ negative responses (Hoi, 2010). In the 2009 parliamentary
2
supply debate, the government had been urged to place greater emphasis on instilling the young Singaporeans with sound values while in pursuit of academic excellence (People’s Action Party, 2010). To prepare the Singapore students for the challenges in the globalised and knowledge-based world, education in Singapore has seek to rebalance to focus more on the moral formation aspects, equipping them with both the 21st century competencies and core moral values. Researchers agreed that children in the elementary schools are at a formative and malleable period, thus moral education can be impactful to their moral development (Baliey, Tappan & Brown, 1998). The Primary Education Review and Implementation committee was formed to review the primary education, reflecting the ministry’s recognition of the integral role of moral education. The committee recommended the strengthening of the quality of non-academic education in primary schools, with greater investment in subjects such as physical education, art and music, which play a central role in character development (Ministry of Education Singapore, 2009). In addition, the recently released Secondary Education Review and Implementation report too had its focus placed on the strengthening of teacher-student relationship, social-emotional support, character-building and citizenship education (Ministry of Education Singapore, 2010b). Moral education is increasingly integrated into the formative education and more proactively promoted by the government as the new Character and Citizenship Education module is expected to be introduced and infused into the core examinable subjects by 2013 (See, 2011).
At the same time, recognising the potential impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) could bring to education, the MOE has launched a series of 5-year ICT Masterplans since 1997 to integrate ICT into education to enrich and transform the learning environment to assist students in the acquisition of higher order of thinking skills and the 21st century competencies (Education Technology Division, 2010). The latest ICT Masterplan with its vision of “harnessing ICT, transforming learners” prompts teachers to leverage on the
3
affordances of ICT to assimilate ICT into curriculum in order to promote and develop self-directed and collaborative learning skills in students (Education Technology Division, 2010).
However, while the ministry policy is promoting the integration of ICT into curriculums, the MOE CME syllabus lacks mentioning the ICT pedagogical approach to moral education and ICT resources for the CME curriculum are limited (Curriculum Planning and Development Division, 2006).
There are studies that investigated the use of technology to enhance moral education;
some involve the creation of computational authoring systems to assist students in self-identity construction (Bailey, Tettegah & Bradley, 2006; Bers, 2001, 2003; Bers & Cassell, 1998; Umaschi, 1996) while others attempted to explore the use of multi-users virtual environment (Jamaludin, Yam & Ho, 2009; Lee & Hoadley, 2006) or simply the use of readily available film video clips for moral development (Samuelson, 2007). With technology, students are able to engage in active learning as they take charge of their learning process and progress. Collaboration in online communities connects students to authentic learning context, and gain wide and alternative perspectives to moral issues. Digital storytelling (DST) offers an alternative and viable way to cultivate values in students. Creating digital moral stories may prompt students to review the surrounding moral issues or their experiences, clarify their values and present the abstract value concepts into a concrete and sequential manner (Watson, 2003). At the same time, students’ literacy and technological skills can be enhanced (Lowenthal, 2009; Robin, 2008).
Thus, this study proposes to leverage on the digital storytelling pedagogy to foster moral development in a Singapore primary school, as an attempt to create ICT-enriched learning environment that could empower learner to engage in collaborative, authentic and self-directed learning to form and refine their value systems, as well as to acquire the 21st century skills concurrently.
4
1.2. Research purposes
The research purposes of this paper include the following:
(1) design and develop a digital storytelling incorporated CME curriculum unit on the moral value, respect, for the primary five students;
(2) formatively evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the newly designed and developed curriculum unit.
5