December 12, 2024

On 11 December 2017, then-National Development Minister Lawrence Wong announced that the Dakota Crescent estate, now a 66-year-old estate, will be slated for redevelopment, save for six blocks. The estate was originally developed by the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), to reduce the rapidly-growing number of kampongs in the Kallang area.

The Kallang area is now home to not only old estates like Dakota Crescent, but also Singapore’s only legalised red-light district. In ‘Bringing the classroom to the real world: Field trips to marginalized neighborhoods’ (The Journal of Economic Education, 2023), Associate Professor EeCheng Ong and Dr Timothy Wong (both NUS Economics) investigate experiential learning by bringing their students on field trips to neighbourhoods such as Dakota and Geylang to produce a nuanced understanding of economic concepts and how they apply to real-life situations.

The researchers conducted their investigations while instructing three undergraduate courses – Urban Economics, Labor Economics, and the Economics of Inequality. The students in these courses were taken to neighbourhoods that are geographically close but often unfamiliar, such as Geylang and Dakota. The two neighbourhoods were a red-light district in Geylang and a public rental housing estate in Dakota where residents have been displaced over the years. The Geylang and Dakota neighbourhoods exhibited similar themes such as poverty and crime, serving as an apt example of the economic issues discussed in the undergraduate courses.

The researchers found that through experiential learning and writing reflections afterwards, the students successfully recognised economic concepts in real-life community settings, evaluated the assumptions and credibility of economic models, and put into context and reassessed the costs and benefits for the theoretical economic actors they study in class. For example, a student witnessed how increased surveillance in Geylang illustrated the Schelling concept in game theory. These findings suggest that experiential learning is effective as it goes beyond theory and leaves a lasting impact on students.

Read the article here.