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Hitherto, student responses to ethically oriented pedagogies in Literature classrooms have rarely been studied in non-western, multicultural contexts, and often assume monolingual text selections in English. As an Outer Circle English-using society, Singapore presents a multicultural Asian context worth studying where students connect aesthetic analysis with ethical issues. In this paper, I extend theorisations of ethical criticism concerned with constructing ethical meaning to interpretive discourse in classroom settings. I draw upon Derek Attridge's notion of responsible readings to examine students' responses to linguistic diversity in two multicultural Asian Secondary Four (Grade 10 equivalent) Literature classes from a co-designed unit on race and identity in Singapore in a larger study. Focusing on their translingual dispositions, I analyse how students express receptive and resistant responses in comparing three English translations of the Malay poem 'Di Tengah Alam' by Hadijah Rahmat, when minority-race students are linguistically privileged and majority-race students are linguistically disadvantaged.

This paper examines the official pedagogic discourse communicating the explicit inclusion of Mental Health (MH) education in Singapore’s revised 2021 Character and Citizenship (CCE2021) curriculum within Singapore’s state-driven educational context of decentralised centralism. By adapting Basil Bernstein’s theoretical work on pedagogic discourse – using William Tyler’s typology of Bernstein’s ‘Pedagogic Codes’ and ‘Official Pedagogic Identities’ – our findings reveal how MH in CCE2021 projects different, simultaneous student identities. These include retrospective identities of students as resilient, community-minded citizens; prospective identities of students as vulnerable cyber users requiring explicit guidance for their future-readiness; de-centred therapeutic identities of students as reflective, self-actualising students requiring psychological safety; and de-centred market identities of students as trained advocates and community first responders. Together, they generate a tension where therapeutic identities are positioned as prerequisite to the other identities, subsuming individual well-being within community well-being, and conflating the intrinsic good of personal resilience with instrumental notions of future-readiness. This expresses a paradox where state-student social relations are both transformed and continued, as concerns of student confidentiality and efficacy of help-seeking efforts persist. Overall, we contend the educational reform of MH in CCE2021 accommodates rather than reconciles progressive concerns of youth mental health with neoliberal state imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]