Moulding student mental health in Singapore’s Character and Citizenship Education: projected pedagogic identities

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the official pedagogic discourse communicating the explicit inclusion of Mental Health (MH) education in Singapore’s revised 2021 Character and Citizenship (CCE2021) curriculum within Singapore’s state-driven educational context of decentralised centralism. By adapting Basil Bernstein’s theoretical work on pedagogic discourse – using William Tyler’s typology of Bernstein’s ‘Pedagogic Codes’ and ‘Official Pedagogic Identities’ – our findings reveal how MH in CCE2021 projects different, simultaneous student identities. These include retrospective identities of students as resilient, community-minded citizens; prospective identities of students as vulnerable cyber users requiring explicit guidance for their future-readiness; de-centred therapeutic identities of students as reflective, self-actualising students requiring psychological safety; and de-centred market identities of students as trained advocates and community first responders. Together, they generate a tension where therapeutic identities are positioned as prerequisite to the other identities, subsuming individual well-being within community well-being, and conflating the intrinsic good of personal resilience with instrumental notions of future-readiness. This expresses a paradox where state-student social relations are both transformed and continued, as concerns of student confidentiality and efficacy of help-seeking efforts persist. Overall, we contend the educational reform of MH in CCE2021 accommodates rather than reconciles progressive concerns of youth mental health with neoliberal state imperatives.KEYWORDS: Mental health educationcharacter educationcitizenship educationBasil Bernsteinofficial pedagogic identitiesSingapore AcknowledgementsOur first and third author (Nah Dominic and Nur Diyanah Anwar) were both supported by the Nanyang Technological University Research Scholarship during the co-authorship of this manuscript. The authors would like to thank Emeritus Professor Dr. Ron Toomey (Victoria University) and Associate Professor Dr. Lim Tze-Wei Leonel (National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University) for useful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Nanyang Technological University [Nanyang Technological University Research Scholarship].