Urban Eyes

The idea behind this is to create a framework to help participants draw relevance of being in an urban environment to achieve learning outcomes. In mainland expeditions, there are many recurring urbanscapes that we will come across, such as HDB flats, park connectors, rivers or reservoirs, and places of worship. These places are connected via overarching themes that can bring out a similar understanding of historical and current challenges of Singapore.

The main learning outcome for Urban Eyes is to help participants to become a concerned citizen. A concerned citizen is defined by MOE as one “who is rooted to Singapore, has a strong sense of civic responsibility, is informed about Singapore and the world, and takes an active part in bettering the lives of others around him.”

The intent is through the explorations of various locations through discussions, sharing and activities, participants can be more informed about Singapore so as to develop an attachment to the community and environment and eventually think of ways to contribute to it.

During the process of discussion, participants may also be more aware of different perspectives of other participants in their sharing of their experiences, which increases their social awareness. At the same time, understanding of national issues and governmental processes can help to increase civic literacy.

Through a variety of place-based activities such as discussion questions, games, stories and instructor sharing, participants can better make sense of the complexity of any given place and how the places affect the lives of the community using it. There will be references to historical contexts that better informed how these places came to be and then participants can explore about future challenges with regards to these places and how they can play a part.

There can be different levels of engagement either at a micro level of an individual or getting them to think at a more macro level of the nation or the world.

The intent is to create connections and relevance to these everyday urbanscapes which the participants might have overlook and offer a different understanding to them.

The 3 lenses use are Heritage, Environment and Development. Each lens has at least 3 different approaches to it, resulting in a 3 x 3 matrix below. Instructors may free to use each approach by itself or create a in depth discussion over the 3 days of expedition.