Designing education for agency

I applied Social Network Analysis and podcasting to explore how Thai students’ friendship patterns and cultural norms relate to bullying and active upstanding. My network maps and student interviews highlighted how deeply rooted norms like krengjai and pii‑nong can make bystander intervention difficult. Critical academic feedback pushed me to address the ethical implications of behavioral tracking, steering my later work toward low-risk, participatory design routines rather than continuous surveillance.

Drawing on co-creation and facilitation principles, I developed a practical facilitator manual for running student leadership workshops in highly hierarchical Thai classrooms. The guide addresses systemic power differentials and senior-junior dynamics directly. By designing safety mechanisms like anonymous writing, small-group anchors, and transparent feedback loops, the framework helps schools build healthy routines where student contributions genuinely influence decisions.

I 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.

I 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. My design responds to resilience work that overemphasises individual grit while ignoring relational safety and structural pressures. By centring shared stories, consent, and careful facilitation, I treat resilience as a collective, community-led practice.

I 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 an education policy officer (a role I once held in a distant past), 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 policies, if left unchallenged, risk reshaping classrooms into data extraction sites rather than spaces for character and democratic participation.

I 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.

Together with coursemates, I mapped out techno-solutionism in education as a wicked problem rather than a simple design challenge. We 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.