History pervades public culture and everyday life: through family histories, political discourses, popular culture and media, classroom instruction, museum experiences, and commemorative events. Historical sites such as memorials, museums, and heritage places can be interpretive sites to help students actively participate in public debates about the meaning of the past and how the past is represented. Well-designed historical fieldwork offers students authentic learning experiences in historical investigation and gives them opportunities to more fully consider the “variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard” (Gadamer in Truth and Method. reasoning skills, conceptual understanding, and knowledge about the past. It focuses on the ways history is represented and how it has been used to communicate meanings about identity (individual and collective)—past, present, and future (Nordgren in Theory Res Soc Educ 44:479-504, 2016). The chapter calls for an interpretive approach to fieldwork to help students think about the ways different historical sites represent the past, the ways they “work” to convey particular pasts, and the different kinds of “readings” that can be done to more critically interrogate these representations. Inquiry-based fieldwork can support this kind of work by scaffolding students to more critically question sites as “representations” of the past and providing them with the means to consider how histories get constructed, for what purposes, and for whom. Continuum, New York, NY, p. 285, 2006). This chapter provides a framework based on the systematic questioning of historical sites to support rigorous fieldwork as a central part of history education to develop students’ historical

The history of modern Chinese schools in Singapore may be traced back to the early 20th century, when efforts to provide vernacular education in the British colony were made by community leaders across Chinese dialect groups, with support of the Qing Empire. Only a handful of these were selected as elite schools for bilingual education under the Special Assistance Plan (SAP) introduced in 1979 in independent Singapore. This paper examines the historical trajectories of these early schools from early association with Chinese nationalism to becoming multi-ethnic schools or simply defunct. It will focus on the case of the former Yeung Ching School in ‘Chinatown’ catering to the Cantonese community, to explore how the legacy of a Chinese school may be impacted by state formation and urban development since the 1950s, and also to point out a gap in current heritagisation pertaining to the role of education in shaping cultural identities.

Maritime archaeology may be broadly defined as the study of human interaction with the sea through the in situ documentation of shipwrecks and their cargoes. Underwater excavation presents many challenges not encountered on land, such as limited time, environmental hazards, and severe corrosion and decay of artifacts, including the ship’s hull. An added regional challenge is the extensive looting of shipwreck sites throughout the seas of Southeast Asia. Despite all this, our knowledge of ship construction, life at sea, navigation, trade routes, general trade, and the ceramics trade in particular, has been vastly enhanced by the discovery of over a hundred shipwrecks in Southeast Asia and China. Several are of particular relevance to our understanding of premodern Singapore and the environs. This chapter will briefly examine the challenges unique to maritime archaeology, before delving into important discoveries that shed light on Singapore during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the Binh Thuan, Wanli, Vung Tau, and Ca Mau shipwrecks. There will be discussion on how to interpret and benefit from exhibits at maritime museums, with specific examples. The chapter shall conclude with reflection on the potential of maritime archaeology in Singapore in the context of local and international developments.

Fieldwork using children’s localities and beyond is important for learning primary social studies as it provides many cognitive and affective benefits to young learners. For fieldwork to achieve active student learning and engagement, inquiry-based fieldwork can be adopted. In this chapter, the authors will look at such an approach for teaching primary social studies and the stages for fieldwork planning. They will share their findings from their small-scale qualitative study which focused on their student teachers’ understandings of the approach, their concerns for planning and implementing inquiry-based fieldwork in schools, and how they would like to be supported by their schools in addressing their concerns. The authors will discuss the implications especially those on the school support for beginning teachers’ fieldwork application in primary social studies teaching in Singapore.