I just put on the finishing touches on the syllabi for the courses I’m teaching here at Singapore Management University in the Office of Core Curriculum for Term 1. Teaching starts next week. Because of the pandemic, all of our Core Curriculum courses will take place online.
I’ve got two offerings this term. I’m continuing as a Core Curriculum faculty member to be part of the team offering the Big Questions course this year, which revolves around the theme of the global and the local. I had the pleasure of piloting a version of this course last term, which was titled ‘Finding Home in a Globalized World.’ Like its predecessor last year on happiness and suffering, it’s an interdisciplinary course for first-year students, whom we encourage to ask the ‘big questions’ from multiple perspectives. In ‘Global and Local,’ we explore how the processes of globalization might be seen from the perspective of ‘the local,’ variously conceived.
The links to the syllabi above show how I, as part of the team that’s rolling out these courses, have come at these topics. Our team circulates a master syllabus, and faculty have discretion in changing some things around to better suit our scholarly interests and pedagogical style.
I also get to teach my own course here this term, which I’ve titled ‘Publics and Privates on the Pacific Rim.’ I often tell a joke, which I’ve told in public, that one time, I was grading an exam — incidentally in a course on geographies of the Pacific Rim for which I served as a teaching assistant five times in a row as a graduate student — and one of my students had meant to write ‘public’ but misspelled it without the ‘l.’ I circled it in bright red and quoted the Princess Bride in my comment: You keep using that word. I do not think you know what it means.
Now I get to teach a course on that whole mishap. We will move through how public and private spaces, and everything in between, are conceived of in the ideological geography of the ‘Pacific Rim,’ the aspirationally liberal zone of market integration between the Asia-Pacific and the Americas that promised so much by way of multiculturalism and world peace.
I’m happy to share these syllabi, especially as my workplace often talks about the sharing culture that we want to see become an ecological norm in our global civil society. If you use them, just give credit where it’s due; say you got the ideas from me, but are running with them in a different direction from me, probably. This is how I teach these courses too. I present strong arguments about how I think through these concepts in order to provoke students into coming up with ideas that may be complementary or even challenging to mine. It’s how to ask big questions, I think. The goal is to develop a generous and generative openness in our intellectual commons. I hope what we do here goes some small way in forming the culture of collective inquiry we will need to thrive in these twenty-first century ecologies.
Justin K.H. Tse 