Designing education for agency

Applied Social Network Analysis and podcasting to explore how Thai students’ friendship patterns and cultural norms relate to bullying and upstanding. Network maps and interviews highlighted how krengjai and pii‑nong make bystander intervention difficult, even for students with strong values. Supervisor feedback emphasised ethical risks of mapping vulnerable students and the need for clearer indicators of change, which later pushed the Futures Project toward participatory design and low-risk routines instead of continued surveillance.

Drawing on co-creation and facilitation principles, this work develops a practical “manual” for student leadership workshops in Thai schools. It foregrounds power, vulnerability, and trust-building, recognising that juniors often hesitate to speak under seniors’ gaze. Techniques include co-designed ground rules, written responses before speech, transparent process logic, and clear commitments about how student contributions will be used. These design choices prioritise character and relational safety over speed, while still supporting concrete changes to routines and meetings.

Used Ruth Levitas' utopia as method to explore how Singapore’s high-performing school system might look if character formation, rest, and student voice were treated as core outcomes rather than soft extras. I contrasted a familiar trajectory of efficiency and ranking with preferable futures where courage, care, and relational safety are designed into everyday routines. The work sharpened my awareness of how my own Singaporean training shapes what I see as “good schooling,” and pushed me to treat systems as contestable designs instead of fixed benchmarks to export into Thailand.

Proposed a “human library” where students borrow lived experiences instead of books, listening to peers and teachers tell short, honest stories about struggle, failure, and recovery. The design responds to resilience work that often emphasises adjustment and grit, but underplays relational safety and structural pressures in high-stakes schooling. By foregrounding shared stories, consent, and careful facilitation, the concept treats resilience as a collective practice of listening, witnessing, and re-signalling what counts as strength in school.

Crafted a fictional government memo arguing for expanded learning analytics and behavioural monitoring in schools, written in a neutral bureaucratic tone that gradually revealed its assumptions. By inhabiting the role of a policy officer, I showed how language about safety, efficiency, and personalised learning can normalise surveillance, narrow views of learning, and sideline questions of student agency and consent. A short critical reflection then unpacked how such memos, if left unchallenged, risk reshaping classrooms into data extraction sites rather than spaces for character and democratic participation.

Treated Singapore’s Full Subject-Based Banding (FSBB) as a wicked problem, where equity, excellence, identity, and labour-market demands pull in different directions and resist tidy solutions. I argued that while FSBB softens the edges of streaming, it still frames students mainly as future workers to be efficiently sorted, with limited space for agency, democratic participation, or character formation. By reading policy texts alongside classroom realities, I framed FSBB as one contested future among many, and sketched what reforms might look like if they started from belonging, dignity, and relational safety rather than from optimisation alone.

Mapped out techno-solutionism in education as a wicked problem rather than a simple design challenge. Surfaced how commercial interests, policy pressures, teacher workload, inequality, and cultural beliefs about “innovation” interact to produce recurring cycles of EdTech hype and disappointment. The group mapping activity helped me see why quick technical fixes to deep educational issues are so attractive, and why futures work needs to start from values, relationships, and context instead of from tools.