Julius Bautista
Member
Impact Programs
NUS College
Teaching is a form of reciprocal empowerment — education comes alive when we discover that learning can serve, and be shaped by, the communities around us.
Dr Julius Bautista is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Impact Programs at NUS College. He holds a PhD in Southeast Asian Studies (Anthropology) from the Australian National University (2004) and previously held academic appointments at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, NUS, and as a tenured Associate Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University.
His teaching interests centre on experiential and service learning in higher education, with a particular focus on community-engaged education — designing curricula and infrastructure that move university-community partnerships from one-directional outreach toward models of reciprocal empowerment. He is the co-founder of the Service Impact Learning Community (SILC) at NUS College, an inclusive platform for educators to develop sustainable, evidence-based approaches to integrating service-learning into the curriculum.
I contribute to the Academy a practitioner’s perspective on community-engaged, service-learning pedagogy — built through my work as Director of the NUS College Impact Experience Program, and co-founding the Service Impact Learning Community (SILC). I bring knowledge and experience in embedding service-learning into curriculum design, and about evaluating its impact on both student learning and community partners, to colleagues working on similar challenges across other faculties. NUSTA will serve as a platform for collaboration with the wider community of educators on interdisciplinary, cross-faculty projects that community engagement inherently demands.
● Silver Award, Sustainability Education (for the NUS College Impact Experience Project) — Quacquarelli Symonds Reimagine Education Awards, London, 2025
● NUS Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA) — 2025
● NUS College Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (FTEA) — 2024, 2025
● NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (FTEA) — 2012, 2013
● Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Special Award for Versatility in Teaching — 2013