The Peranakan Museum reopened in February 2023, signalling a shift in its focus to better showcase the diversity of the Peranakan community, presented through objects exploring the cultures of communities such as the Chitty Melakans, Chinese Peranakans, and Arab Peranakans. The Museum Education team worked on developing resources and programmes for schools to better highlight these narratives.

This presentation focuses on the collaboration between the Education team and two secondary schools to learn about the Singapore Chitty Melaka community. It explores the possibilities of what collaborative museum education practices can achieve through the cooperation of source communities with museums, in presenting students with a more rounded perspective in accurately highlighting minority voices, showing the future of what cooperation between museums and schools can achieve in providing students with authentic learning opportunities from a real-world context, emphasising the change in position of museums as holders of knowledge to one where museums are bridges between source communities and educational partners through knowledge sharing.

This project between the Peranakan Museum and the two schools focuses on bilingual literacy in the English and Tamil languages through interviews that students conduct with the members of the Chitty Melaka community and the creation of bilingual content to be presented on a virtual gallery. Students would also engage in opportunities in humanities learning with the investigation of oral history accounts and intangible cultural heritage through lived experiences of Chitty Melaka youth. This is made possible through the museum’s community partnerships with the Chitty Melaka (Peranakan Indian) Association.