This chapter follows two iterations of the GroundBreakers artist incubation programme (2018 and 2019) at The Artground (TAG). Having drawn inspiration from various incubation programmes for developing works for young audiences—such as the programme at Starcatchers in Edinburgh, Scotland and the New Ideas Lab at ArtPlay in Melbourne, Australia—the Groundbreakers programme is a year-long arts incubation programme that selects local artists through an open call to conceptualise, devise, and test out works for young audiences. Selected artists and arts groups are granted access to TAG’s space for development and devising, awarded a project stipend, given opportunities to present their work-in-progress to targeted age groups, receive feedback and responses from educators, parents and/or children at each stage of development of their work, and given opportunities to share and network with overseas artists. This chapter draws on a number of interviews and observations to examine the views and processes of artists and arts groups involved in the programme, while utilising current research literature surrounding arts incubation as a guiding frame for discussion. The chapter concludes with reflections from two Groundbreakers, Faye Lim from Rolypoly Family (Chap. 7) and Melissa Quek from The Kueh Tutus (Chap. 8).

In a globalized world of mass migrations and movements, education can provide a much-needed focus on understanding local place as part of the larger ecosystem we call our world. Local knowledge and understandings constitute the anchor from which students can begin to interpret and make sense of the world. In this context, it is valuable to engage in place-based learning that focuses on using local place, community, and environment as a beginning point for engaging in real-world disciplinary and community understandings. Drawing from actual fieldtrips with pre-service teachers at the National Institute of Education, this chapter brings together the perspectives of three teacher educators—from geography, history, and literature—to highlight how different disciplinary lenses and questions shape fieldtrips about the same location. Each disciplinary lens brings new understanding to place and adds to students’ layered sense of place. Such cross-disciplinary collaborations are necessary in our complex, interconnected world to help students gain holistic understanding of how place matters.

Fieldtrips play a crucial role in students’ learning by providing them with a shared social experience beyond the confines of the classroom. The chapter highlights the value of “everyday spaces” in historical fieldtrips. These spaces are authentic and are more commonly associated with mundane day-to-day living rather than spaces dedicated for historical study such as museums and heritage sites. Nonetheless, they can enhance students’ understanding of history and heighten their awareness that the past is all around them. Reframing such everyday spaces as a platform for history education is empowering—it allows for a diversity of learning experiences and data collection and brings to life historical concepts through a greater degree of interaction between the students and space, as the former become active constructors of historical knowledge. Everyday spaces also lend themselves naturally to a multidisciplinary approach of learning, which consequently provides opportunities for teachers to incorporate other disciplines into the fieldtrip. In this chapter, a fieldtrip to Balestier, a subzone in the central region of Singapore, is presented to illustrate the value and potential of everyday spaces for the teaching and learning of history.

Although there is no large-scale and coherent survey available on teacher-guided history fieldtrips in Singapore, recent exploratory case studies have emerged on the use of museums in the teaching of premodern Singapore history. This chapter seeks to locate the efforts of a group of history teachers in the context of collaboration with academic and professional bodies as well as a Networked Learning Community who systematically sought to incorporate museum-based learning and embed such teaching resources in the teaching of ancient Singapore history. Using Activity Theory (AT) as a learning theory to explore these networks of collaboration, the learning networks that were established showed that such approaches could lead to a more effective co-creation of knowledge outcome for practitioner inquiry and have some positive outcomes for student learning. Data was collected from teacher reflections and surveys as a basic unit of analysis and from students to gauge how they benefited from such learning approaches. The analysis of teacher responses showed that there was increased teacher confidence in the teaching of ancient Singapore history, and students derived direct and indirect benefits from a networked system of learning. From the perspective of AT, although the collaborative linkages established between the different institutions (museums, academic institutions, schools, and Ministry of Education) were not bound by any fixed rules, the committed efforts of the Master Teacher and teachers played an important role in setting up norms of collaboration among the different institutions to impact student learning about ancient Singapore.