Making Learning Real

Narratives came about because way back in the day, about nine years ago, we were revisiting how WCT would be taught. Earlier on it was a very singular kind of model. On the surface, the model seemed perfectly interdisciplinary, but we realised it was much more literary and humanities-focused. We had to rethink WCT to get the best out of the diverse WCT faculty. While we still wanted WCT to have common outcomes like students learning to put together research papers, we wanted to emphasise the different ways to get there. Narratives was the first module to test-bed this revised model. 

Instead of the Paper 1-2-3 model, we would instead use the semester to do a full-on research paper. Students would collect their own data, analyse that data, and write that research article using all the conventions of research article writing. The idea was to have maximum transferability. Whether you’re in engineering or business or history, there are conventions of academic publishing that show up in their kinds of research paper. That process by which you collect data, situate data and frame it into an argument, is a model that best prepares students to do all those tasks once they finish WCT. Of course, it’s never perfect because disciplines are different and have different academic conventions, but it’s a good model. That’s the genesis of Narratives: it rethought the basis of how to do WCT and transformed it to a research, analysis and article write-up process.

There was another component to it. At the end of the class, you would think through the kind of methodology and social science epistemology and see how that would apply to your major, or do something else with the results of your research. For example, repurposing it in a way that isn’t just reporting your research, but instead shows how you learned something through the process – both in terms of the content and the process – and how you can contribute meaningfully to the wider literature. Let’s say you studied racism in Singapore, I don’t want students to just stop at rehashing the narratives part. I want them to link it to the public discourse on racism in Singapore, and how they can offer a different perspective.

Departments are constantly revisiting the approaches and trying not to be stuck in a rut. We had outside writing programmes consultants come in, look at our practices and give recommendations. Departmentally, there was an organised effort to revisit things and the pressures were different. The USP faculty became, in terms of disciplines, much more diverse. 10 or 12 years ago, it was people who were from literature backgrounds. But then, more and more people from other fields were hired, such as anthropologists like myself. We felt oddly constrained by the model of writing; we wanted to teach things that we were good at! The restructuring came about because we wanted the faculty to focus on their expertise. But that means that you need to open up that writing model.

We then coupled that with external consultation. We also factored in: what would be the common experience for students? Transferability became the new key outcome we were looking for. There’s no point in having a fundamentals class if you can’t take it out and pursue it elsewhere; it’s not an end in and of itself. While a political philosopher is very much into textual analysis and logical argument, for me as an anthropologist, I’m very much driven by the data of everyday life. People have all these different things. Instead of obviating those and say we only teach this one model, we decided to think more about: how do we accommodate these diverse faculty and leverage on their expertise? How can we make WCT interdisciplinary in the same way that USP is supposed to be interdisciplinary? 

Though the term transferable skills makes it seem so vocational, it really is about stuff like the habits of the mind, stuff you want to be able to do in USP. Don’t just skim an article to get by in class, that’s not really USP ethos. Our ethos is to take seriously the work that you’re looking at, assess it critically and see how that argument can be deployed in other contexts. These habits of mind are transferable, but perhaps we want to be more mindful of calling them “skills”. The skills might be, for example, how do we get through an academic article. These habits include wanting to do it and feeling like this is part of who you are as a USP student and a scholar. 

I don’t want to make WCT sound like it’s a functional skills class. It’s one of the key spots where we develop the USP ethos: that you’re going to be interdisciplinary, you’re going to be engaged, you’re going to take on these particular habits of mind that make you want to pursue and develop that kind of knowledge. But at the same time, the skill sets that you need to do that are important: reading, sourcing and crafting an argument.

In Narratives, you first learn to grapple with academic articles and have a cogent, concise understanding to redeploy these arguments in other contexts. There was also a focus on data analysis. And then we started just going into the research paper: aggregating the background, collecting data, analysing data, and figuring out what data was relevant to make a particular case.

Different people took different parts of this restructured format and made it their own. They didn’t just take my model and use it. Instead, they looked at what I was doing, took X, Y and Z, then incorporated things of their own. They also used that flexibility to redesign parts of their own class.

I basically changed everything from the basic model, and not everybody did that, nor was it encumbering on everybody to do that. It was more like, “you’re a professional, you decide for yourself what makes sense for teaching transferable skills”. I don’t mean to diss that old model, it works really well for some people. If it works for them, then that’s great. It’s about which model works for different professors, and you can draw out the expertise from everybody. That module design also works within the constraints of a certain community: it’s a sectioned class, so there must be some kind of cohesion and equity in terms of workload. There must be agreed outcomes.

Inquiry modules don’t have those constraints, I think about it very differently. All those modules are designed in tandem with student input. Drawing on those students to think about what sort of interesting nexus of a class, would work for an interdisciplinary class.

There’s “interdisciplinary” but you need to think about it in two different ways. Think about “interdisciplinary” any time you get a hyphenated discipline: “social-psychology”, that’s an established discipline. Is it its own discipline or is it still interdisciplinary? It’s a bit hard to say. Any of those kinds of fields is going to be like that. Another example would be “social-biology”. The other way to think about “interdisciplinary” is that a particular faculty member is bringing things into fields that have not been done before. Something like bringing together the theory of evolution and the philosophy of the mind, that’s something cutting edge that someone like Prof Don Favereau would bring, so he’s being the “interdisciplinary person”.

One of these “interdisciplinaries” comes from an established interdisciplinary field. The first one we do a lot of, like sociolinguistics. People like me will do a lot of the first type of interdisciplinary. To find people like Don Favareau, people who’re really bringing together disparate fields – that’s really hard to find. That kind of “live” interdisciplinary, what kind of expertise do you need for that, where do you get those people? It’s hard.

When you think about it programmatically, where is the interdisciplinarity of USP? Part of it is built into the structure of the programme: the interdisciplinary comes from you taking a combination of humanities and science modules. You as students are getting the interdisciplinary experience. The other way is that within a module, you’re working in different disciplines. It forces you to think beyond your usual paradigmatic, epistemological box. Maybe you were dealing with positive science, but now suddenly you have to deal with ideas of interpretation in literature. Great! That’s the habit of mind of staying open-minded that we hope to cultivate. How much spread you can get in one module – that’s always been the tricky part of designing modules in USP.

In this module, when I first designed the class so many years ago, what students were interested in is the connection between what we think in a structured way, language, and cultural differences. Those are basic questions that fields like linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, and sociolinguistics would ask. So it’s interdisciplinary but it’s got a base with people really working on this. The part that I like to teach is an area of study that was really popular early on. It fell out of favour for half a century, but now it’s really back and become cutting-edge. Thinking about language as a cognitive tool, thinking about how it mediates thought and communication, how we overcome distinctions of individual and social, and how it’s a false dichotomy – that sort of stuff.

The other cross-cutting dimension of the class is that we get to look at a whole lot of crazy cases that are very different from how we structure things. So we get these really wild test cases that help us then denaturalise and denormalise our own practices. What we think is normal, “That’s just how we use language” or “That’s how time works” – that’s constructed and understood differently in different places. But we never think about that. That lets us to denormalise our own ways. It’s the old adage of anthropology, to make the mundane exotic and the exotic mundane. To do those simultaneously is the ethos of the class. To be able to examine our own practices, and what we do with what we perceive to be exotic cases, that makes for a very intriguing module. It makes you think about how the basic, universal categories are not that basic at all. 

The hardest thing is how to make it real. The kind of module that I don’t want to teach is like this: you learn about a module just for learning’s sake. There’s some coolness about that. Let’s say you want to learn about ancient Icelandic history. I might like that because I find it’s cool and all, but it’s not what I want my modules to be. I don’t want stuff to be at arm’s length, I don’t want to be like look at stuff that’s kind of cool but it’s “out there”. I want stuff that’s immediately relevant to one’s own experience. It’s not how language and cognition works for them, it’s just we’re using their examples to make sense of our own lived experiences, to what goes on in your brain, what goes on in your household when you’re using language and structuring thought, when you’re thinking across languages, and when you’re deploying different purposes. What’s happening to you? That’s what I want. It’s not externalised knowledge, but how you make sense of your own lived experience.

And so the question is really, how do you make students question that? To really make sense of what you are learning from those things, sometimes you need an awful lot of knowledge that you just can’t get from the constraints of just one module. For example, how do you learn about cutting-edge DNA if you never took basic biology? How do you do it in a class like this, where students don’t have a background in basic linguistics, basic anthropology and basic cognitive science? Nobody comes into the module equipped with a lot of that background knowledge. How do you get to the point where you can make a meaningful critique of your own thoughts in a super efficient manner that you don’t have to rely heavily on expert knowledge that you need? To figure that out – that’s hard. There has to be enough conceptual material in class to deploy the concepts and make sense of what we’re doing, but it can’t be so onerous such that it’s like “oh man this is like I’m taking a linguistic major”. Finding that kind of balance is hard. I think that’s true for a lot of the USP Inquiry modules, where you want super sophisticated, engaging kinds of stuff, but you’re teaching students who are by and large not experts in the field. How do you get non-experts into expert knowledge in a non-trite and non-trivial kind of way? That’s the main challenge of interdisciplinary Inquiry modules in USP.

Some things work and some don’t. Part of the things we look at in the module is language ideology and how that affects cognition. And there’s a lot of interesting research now on swearing. By popular demand, some students asked “Could we do a unit on swearing?” So we rearranged the syllabus and included a unit on swearing. Some people who were not in the class were Zooming in the class just to participate in the swearing session, just because it’s transgressive and interesting. But it’s also integral to the things we do in class. It’s an important area of study. Students aren’t doing it because they think it’s important in linguistics, they just want the swearing part, but that’s great. The challenge is how do we keep up and how do we adapt to things that clearly students have an interest in.

A second part is: in any of these classes it can be difficult to use the most up-to-date stuff in the field because students don’t have the required background to understand why this up-to-date stuff is so important for the field. So it’s got to be this combination of trajectory stuff: when did these ideas generate, when have they been really productive and where have they gone in the current academic direction? You have to work through it to get to that stuff. If you only look at things published since 2020 then you never get a sense of the field, you never get the important milestones and key insights that are driving the field. We pick some of the key milestones that build up those key intellectual apparatuses. Obviously, you want up-to-date stuff, but those up-to-date stuff are not going to be good unless it’s mixed with the pillars.

How do you do that? What we try to do is to have a sense of closure: that these parts interconnect, that you’re not just learning one thing and it has no relation to the next. So we had a torturous unit at the beginning about grammatical ideas on tense and aspect. Why do we need to torture everybody with tense and aspect? Well, it’s because so much of the later stuff from gestures to linguistic studies – one of the core things that they work on is the issue of structure and time, so tense and aspect really matters. It’s a brutally difficult grammatical subject to learn for students, but it’s a thread that makes everything possible in the later part of the class. When you start to realise that your gesture is related to aspect, it’s kind of freaky. But you can’t appreciate it unless you learn about the conceptual stuff first. Those decisions in any class are always very hard. To have that sense of cohesion in the class, you want things to tie together, and you want students to connect things together. When you want to focus on what’s emergent in the field, you have to curate carefully, if not it’s just a “bag-of-facts” kind of class.

Apart from this issue, I like everything else about the class. But the problem with liking everything in there is when you bump one thing for another thing. To incorporate one thing, I have to take away another thing, it’s like “Urghh, what choice do I make?” And so classes generally change incrementally because of those kinds of pressures. Early on when you’re working on the first few iterations, you can change things a lot. But in general, I think once we hit pretty close to the mark, afterwards it becomes merely a matter of choice.

It has been running for 10 years. Like anything, it got way sharper over the years. As you teach the materials, you start to see more connections that you didn’t consider. You either learn more or notice more from students from different linguistic backgrounds. In the past it was “my Mandarin sucks”, but now it’s more like “my Mandarin sucks and I don’t really care”. There’s a change in attitudes to heritage language and I have to take that into consideration when we’re doing language ideology in the class. I found that Singlish has been more on people’s minds recently, people have specific interest in understanding what Singlish is, not just that it exists.

This video essay assignment started 3 years ago or so. There are a few aspects to it. One is I just wanted to do something different. Every class you’re going to have a term paper, like “That’s it?” Part of it is also from a bigger picture of my own thinking, and this was in conjunction with Prof Alberto because we are both very interested in literacy and literary practices. We’ve been saying for 30 years now that literacy is dead. Well, it’s not exactly dead because students need to be academically literate, but it’s that ideas of literacy have greatly expanded. We need much better visual and mixed-media literacy than we have in the past. You need to deal with mixed media and public presentations. Those are, again, transferable skills. 

In the LCC module, it’s like “Look, this is not one of your major classes, it’s not like you have to score X to pass the course to become qualified for a professional role.” It’s not like that. This module is done for your own intellectual pursuits. So why does the module have to have that kind of standardised bar, as though it’s assessing everyone like you’re doing a degree in it? If I were teaching this class in the anthropology or linguistics department, probably I would have to keep those assessments in place. But in USP, it’s like “C’mon man let’s think differently!” It ultimately doesn’t matter for your major whether you reach that particular milestone or not, it really is about your own intellectual development and engagement. So how do we make that assessment more engaging? A video paper is not just you reciting your paper; do something different! Do something where you can use creativity and the insights you get from the class, to be able to do something else.

While the idea is great, one thing about USP students is that you guys are classically conditioned to not do anything that doesn’t have clear instructions. It’s like “No no no, I need clear instructions! What exactly is the bar here?” When you open it up and say do what you want, it’s like deer in headlights. And that tells me that we’re not doing enough of it. If the idea of USP is to do stuff that’s “interdisciplinary” and “have a space where you can be more creative in the way that you’re approaching your intellectual training blah blah blah”, well then we need assessments that give you more latitude. You need more confidence and capacity to do those different things. If not, everybody goes back to slideshows and narration: things that feel safe. So we need to get past those kinds of “feel safe stuff”. If you’re not going to take an academic risk in USP, when and where in your life are you going to take it? You’re not, basically. You’re not going to risk it in your major, or your job, that sort of thing. So now’s the time, in USP. Pursue it, try something different. So what if you suck at it? At least you tried it. That’s the main inspiration for the video paper, for wanting students to do something different. 

Then students were like, “I don’t know what to do it’s so open”, because as USP students you feel like you need to demonstrate that you mastered the class, that you read every single detail of the assigned readings. Great habits and all that, but you want to have the appropriate space to express that. That’s why there was that portion of the summary in the video paper so that people can feel that they can demonstrate that part of their training. And then after, they feel like they have that base and are able to take a risk in other parts. We need more “oomph” in that kind of direction. I think the results could stand to be more diverse and students could be less worried about grades and CAP. Because that’s the thing: once you get out of school, no one is going to care about your grades. You get a mediocre grade in some odd-sounding class in some programme – that’s inconsequential. I know from a student’s perspective it doesn’t look inconsequential at that moment. You’re trained to think that you need to excel at every single thing that you do. So we’ve got to lighten up that false sense of meritocracy and go for a little more creativity and flexibility, so that students can take more chances. I’m hoping that a class like LCC is where we can do that. 

The rest of the assessments are just about analysis, not essay, not video, not making a grand argument, just “Here’s the pure data, what’s going on in the data? Just use the conceptual stuff to analyse it.” That’s the interdisciplinarity thing – not everyone’s an expert. If you’re putting them in the spot of having to write a paper while sounding like an expert, it always feels kind of disingenuous, like you’re fluffing up the paper. That’s not cool, it’s not a good habit in my opinion. The point shouldn’t be about contributing to this field or that field or whatever, but just to say, “Look, I saw this data and now I can make sense of it through these five articles.” That’s cool. It’s limited in scope but it’s reasonable and not disingenuous. That’s why I don’t want an introduction and general claims – none of this – I just want to focus on the data.

USP students are all super smart and super engaged. But when you’re in a class when you’re not really the expert, do you really want to write some paper making some grand claim about the field based on seven articles that you’ve read? How is that a good habit? But it also doesn’t mean you know nothing, it means you know very well the kind of material that you worked on. Great, deploy it, but don’t posture. I don’t like putting students in a position where they have to posture and pretend that they’re making some general claim.   

I like to make a distinction between “stress” and “pressure”, even if it’s not a useful semantic distinction. Pressure is good, it makes you say, “Okay, I’m going to do it, concentrate and put some energy into it”. But stress is not good, it’s counterproductive. We’ve got problems with stress, we have problems with students stressing out, and it makes their lives difficult and miserable. What’s the point? Why do we inflict stress on ourselves? I know that Singapore likes to inflict stress, it’s part of national ideology that you need to give your 150%. But then again, pressure is good; it’s good to aim high and all that, but we don’t need the stress. 

I also absolutely hate any kind of infantilization. You’re adults, you’re done with high school, you’re done with JC, you’re done with Poly, you’re in university, make your decisions! It’s up to you how you’re going to engage and use your time. I’m not going to be a truant officer, if you come you come, if you don’t come you don’t come. That’s your choice and it should be your choice. I don’t like the idea that students in university should be treated like students in high school; the idea of high school is regimentation. In university, you should be developing your mind and thinking about who you want to be.

The last thing is that it’s all interdisciplinary, everybody has different schedules. If I put a deadline on a certain day, there are bound to be students who will be extremely busy during that deadline. I don’t want to manage the different calendars across the different disciplines and all that. I don’t want the assignments to arbitrarily inflict stress because I arbitrarily picked a date. I would rather say, you’re an adult, you know your schedule, you know that I want to see some intellectually engaged thinking in this class, so you tell me what a good deadline looks like for you to achieve all those things. Make your decision about the deadline.

The trade-off there is that it’s hard to give a lot of feedback. Things are coming in at different times, so it’s hard to give that aggregate feedback. Especially when it’s qualitative, you have to look at the submissions as a whole and you need to have a baseline. 

But it seems to me that’s an okay trade-off. If that’s what it takes for students to diffuse stress and be able to engage more meaningfully with the material, I think that’s worth it. That’s my philosophy behind easier deadlines. There’s so much unnecessary stress in NUS. I like the pressure, you should be pushed to be smart and work hard. But stress is like, “I have 6 midterms and now I have to do this project?” That’s arbitrary, what’s the point? All you’re doing is degrading all the work. You tell me what the deadline would be; manage your own schedule.

The key hardship is that you can never draw on previous training. I can’t run LCC like a linguistic and anthropology class and be like, start talking about grammar and expect everyone to know it. You have to supply all that sort of stuff – that makes it difficult. The good thing is that you’re pitching the class not to train people as anthropologists or linguists, but for people to find their own path and enrich their own intellectual life.

Engineers come to USP, they don’t want to do engineering in USP, they want to do other stuff in USP. They might say like “I know a lot about engineering, and I may be biased towards positive science and scientific method and all that, but I’m ready to hear about that other stuff.” Despite the limitations of not having that training in the field, that disposition is really important, when students are like “I don’t know anything about this but I really want to know about these ideas. How does this intersect with the different ideas that I have, how does this pertain to stuff that I do?” Let’s say you’re doing a class on discourse and thought, how does that apply to things like branding? How does it relate to law? Law students love the narratives class because it’s directly applicable to what they do in law school.

Different people have different reasons for being interested in the things that are going on in this class. Because you’re not training them to have a degree, it’s not like you’re going to be an engineer, you need to know X, Y and Z, or you’re going to be a historian, you need to know X, Y and Z. In USP there isn’t a corpus of knowledge that one has to obtain. It gives us way more freedom to design classes to ask weirder questions, or have a different approach to getting people to engage in whatever content and material works. The classes can be more flexibly designed because they are not part of a trajectory of a major. That kind of freedom is really cool: that’s intellectually liberating, you can do what you want. The downside is, students don’t have the background in the things that you’re trying to teach them.