About This Project

A Decade of Teacher Work Attachments

Long before this project began, the Ministry of Education’s Teacher Work Attachment (TWA) scheme has been the throughline of my professional growth outside the classroom. Each attachment has stretched me in a different direction — from urban heritage to digital preservation to cultural curation — and each has reshaped how I bring history back to my students.

Urban Redevelopment Authority — December 2019

My first TWA paired me with the URA on a Telok Ayer & Ann Siang Hill heritage trail. The booklet I produced was later adapted into a virtual learning journey in 2021, and used as a template for the Bukit Timah and Dover trails in 2022.

National Heritage Board — November 2022

My second TWA, with NHB, produced a digital 3D scan and virtual-reality experience of the Clock Tower at Hwa Chong Institution. The project was later published on Roots.sg and HCI Insights, and remains the attachment I am most often asked about by colleagues.

The Intan — 2023

My third TWA took me into the Peranakan home of Alvin Yapp. I authored a brochure on Peranakan history and material culture, then ran a student learning journey that ended with tea, kueh, and a long conversation about how a private collection becomes a public history.

The Most Ambitious One Yet

The “itch” to do more research had been with me since finishing my MA in 2023, but the timing kept not quite working out. In 2024 I was teaching the A-level graduating cohort in my final year at HCI, and in 2025 I had just changed portfolio at a new school. In 2026, I felt it was now or never — and this self-sourced research study was the right project at the right time.

This fourth attachment is, by some distance, the longest-arc project of my teaching career. The planning alone spanned ten months: mapping itineraries, corresponding with museums, seeking the necessary approvals, and deciding which sites align most with the project’s focus. The fieldwork itself was a forty-day visit across eight European cities — Vienna, Bratislava, Győr, Budapest, Warsaw, Kraków, Paris, and London — covering more than a dozen memorial sites in all, from major state museums to guided tours of Hitler’s Vienna and former concentration camp grounds.

At every site, I carried two simple questions in my notebook: What story is being told here? And who is being remembered? The other half of those questions is just as important — whose story isn’t being told, and who has been left out, silenced, or forgotten.

Two Questions

Every memorial, museum, and monument I visited was built to answer two questions.

1. What story is being told?

Every site picks a version of events to put in front of you. Some places say: this was the Holocaust — millions of Jewish lives, ended. Others say: this was fascism, and we defeated it. Others say: this was a war, and we suffered too. All three can be partly true at the same time, but they are very different stories — and the one a country chooses to tell says a lot about how it sees itself.

2. Who is being remembered?

Once you know what story is being told, the next question almost answers itself: who is in it, and who isn’t? Some sites name individual Jewish victims — the Wall of Names in Paris, the Stolpersteine across Vienna, the “Nameless Library” at Judenplatz. Others remember the dead as a faceless group: “victims of fascism,” “war dead,” “the fallen.” And some people are barely there at all — Roma and Sinti victims, disabled victims, queer victims, women, children. The people who aren’t named, or who appear only at the edges of the room, are the ones who have been forgotten.

Remembering and forgetting are two sides of the same coin. Every time a memorial chooses to tell one story, it chooses to leave another one out.

Whose Stories, Site by Site

At the end of my research, a map of European memory emerges — not of what was remembered, but of whose stories each place chose to tell.

The same forty-day trip would have looked very different if it had been built around a single city. Holding more than a dozen sites in mind side-by-side made one thing inescapable: every memorial is also a decision about who gets to be the subject of the story. Some institutions lead with named Jewish victims from the moment you enter; others still tell the story through the people who liberated, occupied, or governed the dead.

Vienna and Paris place individual Jewish lives at the centre of memory — the Judenplatz Memorial’s 65,000 unnamed books, the Wall of Names at the Mémorial de la Shoah, the Stolpersteine that interrupt the pavement outside ordinary apartment doors. The story being told there is unmistakably Jewish lives, ended, not fascism, defeated. Budapest sits on the fault line: the Holocaust Memorial Center commits to Jewish specificity, while the House of Terror folds Hungarian Jewish suffering into a much wider story of twentieth-century terror that some critics argue lets bystanders and collaborators off the hook.

Kraków offers the starkest contrast of whose story is foregrounded: the Galicia Jewish Museum insists, photograph by photograph, that Jewish Galicia existed as a living world before it was destroyed — while at Auschwitz, a short drive away, the question of whether the central subject is Jewish victims, Polish martyrs, or “the camp itself” has been quietly contested for eighty years. London’s institutions read the story back from a country that received Jewish refugees but was never occupied, and the tonal difference shows in which voices are allowed to speak first.