Thirty-First International Conference on Learning

Abstract

In Singapore, there is a diverse early childhood education landscape situated in a multiracial, multicultural and multireligious society. The diversity of the country has important implications on how values are cultivated in children from young, interpreted and lived out. Early childhood education is offered by a myriad of operators in a market system that is government regulated. This has implications for the quality of early education, in particular, values education as Singapore is a secular society. At the pre-school level, there are four values explicated in the revised Nurturing Early Learners framework, a national curriculum framework for pre-school education in Singapore that was launched in November 2022. Since the revised framework was recently launched, this article seeks to unpack what these values mean in the pre-school context with the view that values are sociocultural constructs and shed light on the current practices in values education. It draws upon a qualitative project that includes multiple perspectives solicited from government officials, religious leaders, early childhood leaders and teachers from various operators. Semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions were conducted and the data is coded, analysed, interpreted and triangulated using thematic analysis. The findings offer insights to the Singaporean interpretations of the four values, shed light on how values have been taught and the challenges teachers and leaders face.