Planning of Experiential Learning Journey

AED38G was offered to me only after an appeal to Nanyang Technological University (NTU). As such, I was not able to offer my own suggestions of where I felt our experiential learning journey should have been. However, with that being said, I did have the wonderful opportunity to tag along with a group that was heading to Jalan Kukoh, a cluster of one-room and two-room rental flats located in the heart of Singapore's prime real estate (Lim et al., 2013). I was indeed intrigued but not for the same reasons my group mates' had. 

Many of the reasons listed for choosing Jalan Kukoh was to witness the stark contrast between the rich and the poor. To witness the dichotomy of arguably the poorest neighbourhood in Singapore, against the backdrop of lavish grandeur was appealing to all the group members. However, I was adopting a different lens altogether. Personally, Jalan Kukoh and Stirling Road (where I have lived for more than 13 years now) have a lot of similarities. Stirling Road is located in Queenstown, known for its exorbitant public housing prices but also known for having a cluster of 1-room and 2-room HDB rentals as well. Due to some unfortunate circumstances, my mum and I are beneficiaries of HDB's Public Rental Scheme and have been living together in a 1-room flat for as long as I have known. Now not a single person in my group at this point knows about where I live or even who I am really so instead of wanting to see Jalan Kukoh as part of my 'experiential learning', my learning took place in witnessing the reactions of my group mates instead. In many ways, I was inspired by Dewey (1934), an academic that Professor Liu had briefly introduced. For me personally, going to Jalan Kukoh would be the same as heading back home from NTU. I expected the same sights, the same sounds and more importantly the same smells (spoiler: my expectations held true). For me, the experience of going to another public rental housing zone would simply be routine and I wanted to avoid that as much as I can. Due to this, I instead chose to study my group mates within the area of Jalan Kukoh. 

To explain how studying my group mates will in turn become my experiential learning journey, some context and perspectives have to be given with which I am framing my learning upon. I am heavily invested, as a sociologist, to the meanings in which people draw from their experiences; not as much to the experience itself per se. In sociology, we term this as symbolic interactionism, a term popularised by social psychologists and sociologists alike in the early 1900s, notably by George Herbert Mead and Herbert Blumer. For Mead, he focused on how people and the ideas of their 'self' are a sum of their experiences and for Blumer, he posited that people act towards things based on the meanings of those said things, and these meanings are derived from social interaction and modified through intersubjective interpretation (Griffin, 2012). 

Another theory I aimed to draw from was from the works of Bourdieu (1990). Pierre Bourdieu on the other hand was concerned more with concepts of social capital and habitus. He contends that how we act, how see the world and how we deal with everyday problems stems largely from our social networks and this is determined by our socioeconomic status as well; since people of similar backgrounds tend to flock together, the habitus that we adopt tends to be the same as well. A recent study done by the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) actually supports his arguments as well. They found that Singaporeans could name social networks of differing gender, age and race but found it hard to name differing social networks of educational background as well as SES (IPS, 2017). 

Extending the argument made by IPS, I was under the assumption that my group mates will be vary much similar as well. Being able to attend university is no easy financial feat and I was confident that this will allow myself to understand how the demographics from the middle and upper-middle class viewed the poor and the working class in Singapore. In a way, I was also trying to understand how they would view me as well. I have to contend however, that I am still in a very privileged position in the Singapore context. I was also able to attend university and my family earned enough for us to live rather comfortably. However, the argument still stands that my habitus and social capital is far different from those of my group members.  

When I introduced this idea to Prof Liu; that I would be learning from the reactions of my group instead of learning from the journey to Jalan Kukoh itself, she was hesitant at first. I still do not know if it was because it was a new idea or that she was against the idea but I was met with considerable resistance. After a while however, we came to a compromise; that I would be able to go with the journey in the lens that I wanted to learn from but I had to provide a disclaimer to my group that I was doing as such. I actually was pretty happy that I could do what I wanted to do because I did feel really strongly about how everyday Singaporeans do view the working class and the poor. Since Singaporeans do feel that they relate to being 'middle-class' regardless of what their socioeconomic status actually defines them as, it would be interesting to see how they viewed the 'Other'.