Educating Indians, learning ‘Indianness’: Navigating pluralistic educational infrastructures in diasporic Singapore

• Main Authors: GRIMLEY, Emma Alexandra, WOODS, Orlando, KONG, Lily
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Indianness; Singapore education; infrastructure; Mother Tongue language; identity; Asian Studies; Educational Methods
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/164
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper advances the idea of ‘educational infrastructures’ to explore the slippages created by national education frameworks and the everyday ways in which citizen-subjects learn to be part of an ethno-cultural community. In doing so, we tease apart the differences between education as a top-down process of citizen-making and learning as a poly-directional assemblage of behaviours and influences that permeate the socio-spatial landscapes of ethnic belonging. We illustrate these theoretical arguments through an analysis of Singapore’s diasporic Indian community and the collapse of linguistically and culturally complex community backgrounds under the Mother Tongue policy. This leads to a pluralisation of learning and negotiation of identity for young people as they attempt to forge their own identities amidst a homogenising sense of ‘Indianness.’ By tracing the evolution of Singapore’s language policies, this paper demonstrates how educational infrastructures come to fill the gaps created by a state-wide commitment to multiculturalism.