Abstract:
A Critical Socio-Spatial Perspective on Reading, Equity and School Libraries in Singapore Although Singapore is lauded internationally for its education system, official educational policies have been criticized for the tendency to sideline socioeconomic status as a factor for school success, a real concern in Singapore where intergenerational income elasticity registered at a relatively high rate of 0.58%. This mirrors international concerns with rising educational inequity exacerbated by the market-driven logics of neoliberalism driving educational policies and practices. As countries struggle to get ahead in the academic game, many countries have chosen to focus on improving reading scores. Reading is undoubtedly a form of cultural capital, and from a human capital perspective, adds to the economic viability of each individual. In Singapore, despite movements and educational initiatives to better teach reading or cultivate a reading culture, how socioeconomic status is related to learning to read and reading is glaringly absent from the public discourse.This study examines the issue of reading and equity in Singapore by focusing on school libraries as a space typically associated with the cultivation of reading habits and practices. Unlike in North America and Australia where teacher-librarians are the norm, the Singapore educational system does not mandate the hiring of a teacher-librarian, and secondary school libraries often languish as under-utilized spaces in schools. I adopt a critical socio-spatial perspective, taking an intentional and focused emphasis on the spatial or geographical aspects of justice and injustice” (Soja, 2009) in order to examine the complex space of reading in schools. A critical socio-spatial perspective that attends to both the social and the spatial recognizes that social and power relations are embedded in spatial organization and the way relations are influenced by space, and vice versa (Lefebvre, 1991). Using a geosemiotic approach (Nichols, 2014) that attends to the physical, social and affective spaces of two school libraries, one in an elite all-boys’ school and another in a co-educational government school, I examine how these seemingly similar spaces are used for differentiated education. Given the uneven home resources between working class and middle-class students, I argue that educators need to consider how school spaces such as the library can interest students in reading. Rather than seeing the student-as-problem, it is important to identify the structure-as-problem to generate fresh insights into how policy and practice can be transformed to make reading and learning more equitable.References:Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Nichols, S. (2014) Geosemiotics. In Alders, P., Holbrook, T., & Flint, A. S. (2014) New methods of literacy research. NY: Routledge.Soja, E. W. (2009). The city and spatial justice. Spatial Justice, 1, 1–5.