The use of stories as a means of teaching moral development in two Singapore secondary schools.

Abstract

Presently, the Singapore’s Ministry of Education requires the teaching of a set of values in its “Civics & Moral Education” 2007 syllabus (“CME”) for all students in the primary (7 years old to 12 years old), secondary (13 years old to 16 years old) and junior college (17 years old to 18 years old) academic levels. Although there are presently no prescribed or standardized methods in teaching these values, it was inferred from the findings collected from the two schools in this research study that the didactic approach to teach such values to the students is commonly employed by most teachers. This qualitative research study explored the use of stories to teach the CME and moral development in schools as an alternative to the present didactic approach. This research study was carried out on a group of 18 secondary 2 students (14 years old) at two government-funded schools located within a 5-km radius and in one of Singapore’s ubiquitous public housing estates.

The aim of this research is to introduce and use stories to teach values as prescribed in the CME in these schools. In so doing it was important to select the appropriate qualitative methods to achieve this and three methods were selected. These involved principally the use of in-depth interviewing methods together with focus-group discussion and non-participant observation methods to collect, understand and present the data of the rich, diverse and detailed responses, reactions and interpretations of the students when and after listening to a set of six stories at two different periods with a three-month interval in between them. The next was to use Kohlberg’s and Biggs and Collis’ taxonomies to assess and evaluate for students’ learning outcomes and whether there has been any apparent or initial evidence of moral or character development.

The importance of this research study is that from the positive findings, discussions were carried out and recommendations made to contribute to these schools for their consideration on the use of stories for their teaching of values as prescribed in the CME.