Citizenship Education for a Racialized Diaspora: How overseas Filipino organizations resist neoliberal curricula

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Citizenship, Communities and Justice in Southeast Asia

Proposal

South Korea and Singapore are home to more than 270,000 Filipinos according to latest reports (Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 2023). Historically, most Filipinos have performed domestic and “unskilled” labor, with racial capitalism reinforcing perceptions that they cannot enter professional or “skilled” occupations (Ward, Chang, & Lopez-Nerney, 2020; Granados & Camposano, 2025). While current literature has recorded the oppression of OFWs in South Korea and Singapore, researchers have yet to understand Filipinos within educational contexts abroad – specifically how racial capitalism appears in the classroom and how it is resisted.

Filipinos that exist within Singaporean or South Korean schools quickly find that education moves at a different pace compared to their homeland. In these classrooms, neoliberalism manifests as emphasis on test scores, competition that strains student relationships and mental health, and the “co-option of the teacher’s soul” into professionalism and consumer-like ties between schools and families (Loh & Hu, 2019). Stephen Ball’s conceptual framework of performativity in neoliberal education (2003) embodies these structures of competition. Performativity and the commodification of education provide the basis for examining Singapore and South Korea for this study, two societies where the effects of neoliberal education are particularly visible and well-documented (Gopinathan, 2005; Sidhu, 2005; Tan, 2008a).

This qualitative research paper follows the experiences of overseas Filipino students, school workers, and scholars within Singapore and South Korea’s highly neoliberal education systems – specifically, how educational organizations for Filipino migrants resist these performance-based standards.

In Singapore, HFSE International School was chosen as the primary organization of analysis, examining how the only Filipino international school in the nation provided an alternative model for education compared to local schools. The findings of this study were presented at CIES 2025 in Chicago as a paper presentation, where over 40 interviews with students, faculty, staff, and families revealed that the school’s cultural orientation prioritized social development, civic responsibility, and collaboration versus the competitive culture of Singaporean schools.

In South Korea, the interviews followed Pinoy Iskolars sa Korea (PIKO), the only Filipino educational organization in the East Asian country and one that unites university students and workers. Across 31 interviews (21 who were Filipino members of the organization, and 10 who were Filipinos that were not), these conversations revealed PIKO as a sanctuary from universities that racialize and exploit Filipino students’ academic labor. PIKO members reported better mental health outcomes and an increased desire to work in humanitarian-focused jobs after joining the organization, whereas non-members felt more pressure to academically perform and produce research, were less likely to seek help or collaborate on work, and viewed career prestige and high salary as their primary goal in their education or work.

These 75 interviews show that Filipino educational organizations abroad are not only cultural anchors but resistance to neoliberal education’s isolating and racializing effects. Through promoting collaboration, mental well-being, and social responsibility, they demonstrate alternative perspectives of what education can mean for migrant communities. This project thus extends conversations on racial capitalism and performativity into transnational classrooms, demonstrating how migrant self-organization envisions new pedagogical futures beyond capitalist constraint.

Author

• Mark Allen Gabe Cu, Stanford University