Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities: Experiences from Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore 9819904854, 9789819904853

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Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1

I-Fang Lee · Sue Saltmarsh · Nicola Yelland Editors

Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities Experiences from Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore

Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific Volume 1

Series Editors Nicola Yelland , Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Carlton, Melbourne, VIC, Australia Clare Bartholomaeus , Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Carlton, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

The Series provides an in-depth analysis of children’s lifeworlds in different locations in the Asia-Pacific. The volumes in the series explore connections between policy contexts, school experiences and everyday activities of children growing up in global cities in the Asian Century. The Series draws on the concept of lifeworlds to consider all aspects of primary school-age children’s lived experiences at school, at home, and in the community, where they are growing up in conditions of rapid globalisation, technological advancement and social transformation. Children’s lifeworlds are particularly important to consider in the current global educational landscape that is focused on what has become known as international high-stakes testing. This Series provides a picture of children’s lifeworlds which takes into account the broader context of children’s educational experiences and outcomes. The Series explores areas such as the broader policy context, pedagogical strategies, curriculum, timetables, assessment, wellbeing and belonging, homework and tutoring, and out-of-school activities. This Series focuses its attention on the Asia-Pacific region, and allows for a broader consideration of the impacts of location at the local, regional, and global levels. Alongside an edited overview book, each volume in the Series dedicates a book-length focus to one global city and draws on the same research methodology and methods. Each volume thus presents a thorough-going exploration of children’s lifeworlds in the location, including a consideration of complexities and diversity. By drawing on an interdisciplinary approach which utilises educational, sociological and cultural studies research design, methods and theories, this Series brings new and innovative interdisciplinary insights into dialogue with educational research. Please contact Grace Ma at [email protected] if you wish to discuss a book proposal.

I-Fang Lee · Sue Saltmarsh · Nicola Yelland Editors

Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities Experiences from Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore

Editors I-Fang Lee School of Education University of Newcastle Australia Ourimbah, NSW, Australia

Sue Saltmarsh Department of Early Childhood Education Education University of Hong Kong Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong

Nicola Yelland Melbourne Graduate School of Education University of Melbourne Carlton, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2730-7816 ISSN 2730-7824 (electronic) Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific ISBN 978-981-99-0485-3 ISBN 978-981-99-0486-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

1 The Global Childhoods Project: Learning and Everyday Life in Three Global Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I-Fang Lee, Sue Saltmarsh, and Nicola Yelland 2 Out and About in Global Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sue Saltmarsh

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3 Exploring the Scholarly Habitus in Children’s Lifeworlds: High-Stakes Testing and Educational Capital . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elise Waghorn, Clare Bartholomaeus, and Nicola Yelland

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4 Picturing Policy: Visual Representations of Curriculum Policy in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Jennifer Crome and Sue Saltmarsh

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5 Everyday Learning Looks Like This: Classroom Ethnographies in Three Global Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I-Fang Lee, Vivienne Wai Man Leung, Kam Ming Lim, Li Mei Johannah Soo, Nanthini Karthikeyan, Clare Bartholomaeus, and Nicola Yelland

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6 Everyday Out-of-School Lifeworlds Look Like This: Children’s Activities in Three Global Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Clare Bartholomaeus, Anita Kit-wa Chan, Nicola Yelland, Nanthini Karthikeyan, and Li Mei Johannah Soo 7 Picturing Educational and Future Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Sue Saltmarsh, I-Fang Lee, and Nicola Yelland 8 Rethinking the Global Childhoods Project: Learning and Everyday Life in Three Global Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Nicola Yelland and I-Fang Lee

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Chapter 1

The Global Childhoods Project: Learning and Everyday Life in Three Global Cities I-Fang Lee , Sue Saltmarsh , and Nicola Yelland

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of the conceptual and methodological framework of the Global Childhoods research project. Situated in three global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore, this project explores connections between policy contexts, school experiences and everyday activities of children and the shaping of their orientations to educational success. In order to better understand the intersections of education policy, practice and everyday life for children, we draw on the concept of “lifeworlds”, which has a rich history in social research as a framework for examining how people and groups experience the world. Moreover, instead of focusing on whose education system is more efficient, or better at producing better outcomes, this research seeks to gain deeper understandings about children’s lived experiences, academic performance and orientations to success by investigating children’s everyday lifeworlds (in and out-of-school experiences). Keywords Lifeworlds · Schooling and education systems · Childhood Studies School plays a major role in contemporary childhoods and schooling is a significant part of everyday life for the vast majority of the world’s primary school age children. Despite persistent disparities in different parts of the world, primary school

I-F. Lee (B) School of Education, University of Newcastle, Ourimbah, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Saltmarsh Department of Early Childhood Education, Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] N. Yelland Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I-F. Lee et al. (eds.), Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities, Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0_1

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education is now compulsory in most countries,1 and the average primary school completion rates are at 84% globally, according to a recent report by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) (2019). It has been noted that the lengths of compulsory education and schooling, school attendance, participation and completion can be powerful predictors of the success of children’s life chances with future implications with regard to healthy development and positive economic opportunities (Heymann, 2013). Globally, governments have long recognised the centrality of education to “economic competitiveness, the reduction of poverty and inequality, and environmental sustainability” (Lauder et al., 2006, p. 1). This recognition by governments has been increasingly accompanied by policy invitations to parents to participate in greater levels of engagement with their children’s learning across the contexts of school, home and community. Positioned as policy levers, parents, in recent decades, have been encouraged to exercise their powers of “choice” and “voice” in order to maintain pressure on schools to provide “quality teaching”, evidenced through student learning outcomes (i.e. Abdulkadiro˘glu et al., 2020; Starnawski & Gawlicz, 2021). Schools have also been obliged and held accountable to elaborate how they are aligned with the quality of education agendas, or policies of national education reform created by individual governments. For many parents, taking up these policy invitations to greater exercise of their parental choice in education is consistent with their own aspirational goals on behalf of their children. Such parents tend to recognise and conceptualise that educational success needs to be valued as a primary means by which social mobility and financial security can be achieved (Saltmarsh, 2015a, 2015b; Vincent, 2017; Vincent & Martin, 2002). While we understand the potentially powerful social implications of children’s schooling and education achievement to their futures, it is important to examine how discourses of educational success give rise to everyday cultural practices. It is also important to consider the extended experiences that children have across their lifeworlds, and to explore what factors are at play in shaping children’s experiences of schooling, their orientations to educational success and their imagined futures. There is ample evidence from fields such as sociology of education to suggest that children’s lives beyond school play an important role in their learning and achievement in school (e.g. Darling-Hammond et al., 2020). Scholars with critical perspectives have long argued that factors such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status intersect with systemic, social and cultural conditions, beliefs and practices in ways that create opportunities and advantages for some while simultaneously placing limitations and constraints on others (e.g. Ambrose & Sternberg, 2012; Gillborn & Youdell, 2000; Halse et al., 2018; McGregor et al., 2017). Outside of school, however, the same external factors that operate to enable, or constrain children in school, are 1

In a UNESCO report of the situation regarding the Right to Education, it was noted that 155 of the world’s 195 countries (79%) legally guarantee 9 years or more years of compulsory education (see https://en.unesco.org/news/what-you-need-know-about-right-education). Additionally, while the most recent figures from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) report that around 59 million of the world’s primary school age children are out of school, the fact that primary education is compulsory in nearly every country. http://uis.unesco.org/en/topic/out-school-children-and-youth.

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part of everyday life shaped by individual characteristics and interests, family histories and backgrounds, peers, communities and cultures. Education is thus situated at the nexus of multiple spheres that are simultaneously global and local, public and private. Within and across these spheres, the time children spend at school is but one aspect of the ebb and flow of everyday life, where school-related activities, aspirations and concerns are also embedded in the contexts of family, home and community life. The many permeable boundaries between these spheres of activity render school to what has been described as an “intercontextual space” where boundary crossings between family life and other educational, policy and social contexts occur (Marsico et al, 2013). In this Global Childhoods project, we understand this “intercontextual space” in terms of policy cultures (Saltmarsh, 2015a, 2015b; Stein, 2004), in which education policy and its attendant practices both within and beyond school settings are simultaneously culturally situated and produced and implicated in the formation of new cultural practices to (re)construct rules and norms (Lee, 2021; Lee & Tseng, 2013; Lee & Yelland, 2017). Children’s lifeworlds (a term to which we will return shortly) are impacted upon by and shaped in dialogue with these policy cultures and the broader social processes of which they are part. In the Asia-Pacific region, where the Global Childhoods project is situated, much has been written about the ways in which policy-makers have increasingly mobilised these intersecting spheres in ways intended to prioritise education as a means of securing national futures in the global economy. For instance, since the late 1990s, there have been multiple waves of inter/national education reform discourses that made explicit links between students’ academic performance and the calibre of education systems. Strong educational outcomes have been treated as a significant indicator of a superior education system, seen in turn as a predictor of national economic progress and development. This is a dominant policy discourse in many parts of the world, including the geopolitical regions of Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. In the popular media, news headlines, often coinciding with the release of testing data, “celebrate or decry the state of school systems at home and abroad” (Sellar & Lingard, 2018, p. 367). Those concerned with falling educational standards make comparisons with the so-called “top performing” education systems, as measured by international high-stakes testing regimes (e.g. Carey & Hunter, 2019; Khan, 2019). In countries that perform more strongly, concerns are raised about the adequacy of systems focused on standardised testing and merit-based streaming, questioning whether current practices can deliver learners, workers and citizens who can think creatively, innovate, problem-solve and enjoy fulfilling lives (Sinnakaruppan, 2017). In both cases, media commentators have suggested ways in which governments might respond and address such concerns at national levels through education reforms policies. For teachers, schools and families, the resultant education policy cultures have become the ideological intertextual spaces in which competition, accountability and personal/individual responsibilities have had powerful effects on reshaping everyday teaching, learning, expectations and aspirations. A significant driver of education policy shifts in the Anglophone and post-colonial countries of the Asia-Pacific region has been the strong performance of a number

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of East Asian countries in international high-stakes testing (Jerrim, 2014; Mervis, 2010; OECD, 2018, 2020; World Bank, 2018). Schooling systems in countries that perform strongly in competitive international high-stakes testing regimes such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) are highlighted as examples to be emulated by countries that perform less well (Hunjam & Bloomer, 2016; Jensen, 2012). Ironically, these international education assessment schemes have produced misconceptions about world education rankings, perpetuating stereotypes that invoke inaccurate depictions of the education systems of the top performing countries in ways that “attribute the region’s high scores to overreliance on rote learning and a lack of deep understanding of what is learned” (World Bank, 2018, pp. 9–10). Despite the lack of evidence to support such claims, empirical research has largely focused on the features of schooling systems (Barber & Mourshed, 2007) to explain consistently high performances. Meanwhile, secondary analyses of PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS data have been concerned with demographic and family variables (Ho, 2010), length of school year (Cheung & Chan, 2009), out-of-school tuition (e.g. OECD, 2011), school quality (Ng, 2008), extent of local autonomy for schools (McConney & Perry, 2008) and the quality and type of homework (e.g. Zhu & Leung, 2012).

1.1 The Global Childhoods Project: Understanding Children’s Everyday Learning and Living The Global Childhoods project emerged against this backdrop of competitive world ranking of education outcomes driving conversations about what constitutes educational success. Instead of focusing on whose education system is more efficient, or better at producing better outcomes, our research interests shifted towards gaining deeper understandings about the intersection of systemic and structural factors with a broader and more comprehensive range of the out-of-school variables that may also have a critical influence on children’s lived experiences, academic performance and orientations to success. Specifically, we set out to investigate how everyday lifeworlds (in and out-of-school experiences) of Year 4 (9–10 year old) students in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore can shape children’s orientations to educational success. We recognise that this age group of students form the first cohort for TIMSS and PIRLS tests of mathematics and science and literacy respectively, thereby offering insights into the performance of countries in international standardised testing. However, going beyond the surface of the world’s educational league table, we see the importance of interrogating and exploring learning and education beyond classrooms in schools by expanding to all domains of children’s lifeworlds. We conceptualise the lifeworlds of children as including all aspects of their lived experiences that occur in school, at home and in social/community contexts (Yelland et al., 2008) by exploring a wide range of activities that children participate in, within school, home and community contexts in each location.

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1.2 Lifeworlds and Policy Cultures: Theorising Education and Everyday Life in Context Situated in the global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore, the Global Childhoods study explored connections between policy cultures, school experiences and everyday activities of children growing up in what has been referred to as “the Asian Century” (see Asian Development Bank, 2011; Australian Government, 2012). In order to better understand the intersections of education policy, practice and everyday life for children, we draw on the concept of “lifeworlds”, which has a rich history in social research as a framework for examining how people and groups experience the world. Drawing on cultural theories (de Certeau, 1984, 1988/2002, 1997; Highmore, 2006; Saltmarsh, 2015a, 2015b) concerned with the interactions between everyday life, policy, institutions and systems, we extend the use of the term lifeworlds from the original (singular) meaning from Husserl (1970) and later Habermas (1987), who regarded the lifeworld as a context for taken-for-granted beliefs, attitudes, competencies and practices. Husserl’s focus was on consciousness, whereas for Habermas, the focus was on socially and culturally linguistic meanings. For Michel de Certeau (1984), attention to everyday life requires analysis of the ways individuals negotiate—often in creative or subversive ways—the institutions that structure their social worlds, producing new ways of being and doing that in turn reconfigure both institutions and cultural practices. If learning involves belonging, transformation and engagement with materials and ideas (e.g. Yelland, 2007), then understanding how students succeed at learning necessitates knowing what they think about their experiences of schooling, how their school-based activities connect with their everyday lifeworlds, and what they understand their educational and cultural futures to be within the current policy milieu. Our study focused particularly on the lifeworlds of children growing up in conditions of rapid globalisation, technological advancement and social transformation. Importantly, local cultures and ways of learning, knowing and doing are transformed by transnational flows (Appadurai, 1996) of people, capital, images, new technologies (Sassen, 2005) and ideas. Children’s lives and learning experiences are part of larger “diasporic public spheres” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 4) within which educational success and future possibilities are imagined and worked towards from within local contexts. In this Global Childhoods project, the concepts of local and global are not viewed as two separate domains but are viewed as interrelated ones. Recent research has demonstrated that the local also transforms the global, with education policy, and educational practices a key means by which children come to imagine and prepare to take up a place in a global world (Kenway & Koh, 2016, 2017; Kenway & McCarthy, 2016; Kenway et al., 2017). Children’s experiences are understood, therefore, not only in terms of their place as citizens in their unique local culture, but as citizens and learners living in an increasingly globalised and technologically interconnected world through global and local circulation of policies, popular discourses and cultures. We conceptualise that the flows of ideas, common senses and practices are multidirections between local and global. For instance, hearing a 9-year-old child humming

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a Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse movie theme song during lunch hour in a Hong Kong primary classroom or a 10-year-old child singing a popular K-pop melody during recess time in an Australian primary school offers some insights into how fluid everyday practices can flow from local to global, or vice versa, to highlight contemporary example of the interconnectedness of the local and global lifeworlds. Our study gives detailed attention to children’s everyday contexts in school and in out-of-school activities, with a focus on children who attend mainstream public sector schools, including those from culturally diverse and economically stressed backgrounds (Ong, 1999; Yeung & Yap, 2013). This reflects the cultural and socioeconomic diversity of the global cities in the project and addresses the need for more contextual understanding about how schools might most appropriately respond to children’s lived experiences and to prepare them for a rapidly changing world (Yelland & Saltmarsh, 2013). As noted in the introduction, the study conceptualises educational experiences in terms of education policy cultures as proposed in Stein’s (2004) cultural approach to policy analysis in the USA, and taken up by Saltmarsh’s work (2015a, 2015b) in Australia. In the Global Childhoods project, we bring these ideas to bear for the first time in Asian global cities, incorporating Asian theories of flexible citizenship and transnationality (Ong, 1999), and the effects of global change on families (Pontecorvo & Liberati, 2013; Yeung & Yap, 2013), with Western theories of policy as culture and everyday practice (Stein, 2004; Certeau, 1988/2002) while keeping in mind with the multiply(ing) frames of references to understand the complexities of educational and national narratives in Asian contexts through post-colonial lenses (Chen, 2010). Taking children’s lifeworlds as a unit of analysis situated within multiple spheres of everyday life and practices, we considered the interrelationship between education policy, schooling and cultural experiences outside of school. For a variety of reasons related to onto-epistemological shifts, children’s actual outcomes in high-stakes testing were not the focus of our research. Instead, we considered how the articulation of testing and student outcomes within policy discourse gives rise to context-specific educational and cultural practices. We see policy discourse—which bears notable similarities as well as points of distinctiveness across the study sites—as dynamic, both shaping and shaped by the everyday practices of teachers and the lifeworlds of students. With a post-structural sensibility, we also see policies as a technology of social administration for governing ways of being and becoming (Popkewitz & Bloch, 2001). Like other policy domains, education policy is part of the management of society in its multiple forms which, for Certeau (1997), not only introduces new agendas in particular fields of practice, but also leaves behind and intersects with prior cultural “remainders”. These cultural remainders—residual beliefs, expressions, meanings and practices—are simultaneously reinvented and reworked in the practices of everyday life, and in the process new cultural formations are inaugurated. Certeau’s theorising of everyday practices and logics as cultural formation informs our considerations of the extant and emergent configurations of high-stakes testing policy cultures, including the “structural realities” (Stein, 2004) in schools that intersect at the convergence of policy vision, policy enactments (Ball et al., 2012) and children’s lifeworlds. Therefore, in the Global

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Childhoods project, we take a significant departure from a comparative education perspective that highlight similarities and differences in educational systems, and policy analysis paradigms that focus on connections between specific policies and policy outcomes or policy effects. Rather, we take an epistemological stand and shifts to look at the cultural study of policy that “directs analytical attention to the multiple meanings that policies engender, through the myriad interpretations of policy makers, policy implementers, policy target populations, and policy analysts” (Stein, 2004, p. 6). The Global Childhoods project employed this approach to investigate how education policy, and the lifeworld experiences of children in global cities are co-implicated in the meaning-making, communicative and relational practices of social actors to whom high-stakes testing and other educational policies have greatest relevance. In seeking additional explanations about the ways that global and local cultures are being (re)made via their implementation and uptake of, resistances to and practices in relation to high-stakes testing policies, we see it as important to adopt a wider view about the purpose of schooling beyond high-stakes tests. Our collective conceptual and theoretical positioning about education and schooling are nested within the ontoepistemological webs of critical perspectives, post-structural and post-colonial theories. Through these lenses, we seek to reconceptualise and interrogate constructions of childhoods and studenthoods, in the Asia-Pacific regions, through which desirable and successful educational outcomes are crafted (see Lee & Yelland, 2014, 2017). Indeed, our research team acknowledge that there are many possible measures of an education system’s success, not all of which are quantifiable in the ways preferred by policy-makers (see Cho & Chan, 2020; Jones et al., 2003; Koretz, 2017). This Global Childhoods study aligns more with critical scholars who critique that test scores do not necessarily show strengths and success in educational systems. For example, Zhao (2012) laments about the competition and narrow focus in education systems that reduce student lives to the study and practice of employable skills. Reducing orientations of educational success into quantifiable of outcomes and measurable academic performance in league tables has been dangerously nested within the rationales of neoliberal rationality that constructs students/children are deemed as human capitals (see Apple, 2001; Ball, 2016). Additionally, there has been research that highlights concerns about the effects of national testing on children’s understandings about the purpose and significance of tests (Howell, 2017), and the “capacity of high-stakes regimes to distort teaching practices, constrain the curriculum and narrow students’ educational experiences” (Polesel et al., 2014, p. 640). Our purpose here then, is not to advocate for or against high-stakes testing, but rather to consider how “the comparison of educational systems through rankings and their interpretation are guiding national school policies in a normative fashion” (Bulle, 2011, p. 503), and to better understand how school students’ lifeworlds and orientations to success are impacted by tests and test preparation. Our goal is that these contextual understandings in the Global Childhoods study, lead to new ways of anticipating and addressing the educational needs, aspirations and learning outcomes of students from diverse populations, in order to ensure that their schooling is both engaging, meaningful and effective in preparing them for successful global futures.

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1.3 Methodological Approach: From Home to School and Back Again The Global Childhoods project is a multi-site, mixed methods study conducted by research teams in the three global cities of Melbourne, Singapore and Hong Kong. The same methodology and data collection techniques were used in each city, in order to gain insights into and enable meaningful comparisons between the ways that high-stakes testing policies might shape the perspectives and practices of teachers and students, and also to be able to consider the cultural contexts of children’s lifeworlds. The methodology brings together data generated in four key ways: a survey with primary school age children about aspects of their out-of-school lifeworlds and their schooling experience, classroom ethnographies, learning dialogues where the children respond to specific prompts that go to their engagement in school and their aspirations for their futures and re-enactments of children’s out-of-school time activities on an individual basis. An overview of each form of data collection follows together with some of the ethical and pragmatic considerations encountered by the team.

1.3.1 Online Survey An online survey of students in Australia (Melbourne), Hong Kong and Singapore was conducted in this Global Childhoods project. A total of 627 Year 4 students participated in this online survey late in 2018. The survey questionnaires were designed to engage student participants to describe their out-of-school activities and how they engaged with school and the people in it. It included questions about time spent on specific curricular content, students’ self-efficacy, goals, aspirations and engagement with schooling. The survey data analysis was conducted in collaboration with Sandy Muspratt, whose quantitative analyses included basic descriptive estimates across countries and groups and the application of multivariate techniques (e.g. data reduction techniques such as factor analytic techniques, clustering techniques and Multiple Correspondence Analysis) to a set of variables in order to disentangle the patterns of association among the variables; and to compare the resultant structures across countries and across groups within countries.

1.3.2 Classroom Ethnographies Our classroom ethnographies included a total of six classrooms in six public primary schools across the three global cities. These multi-site ethnographies of school-based pedagogical and learning practices (e.g. classroom activities, pedagogies, discussions

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about learning, preparation for testing) also enabled researchers to engage in conversations with students and teachers about their work which helped the researchers to uncover their perspectives and experiences regarding the classroom experience. Our researchers spent a full week (5 days) during each semester in the classrooms in all three global cities to observe and document the Year 4 students’ typical school days. Being classroom ethnographers, our researchers arrived at the schools like a Year 4 student. We would sit in the classroom to observe and interact with teachers and children through in all the learning periods as well as “tag along” with students during their recess time, lunch hour and specialist classes such as music, physical education and visual arts classes. After each of the learning periods, we would also have some casual conversations with the classroom teachers sharing their insights, asking for clarifications or chatting about experiences with teaching and learning in the classrooms with the students. The teachers’ and school leaders’ (i.e. assistant principals) sharing allowed us to understand their perspectives and experiences regarding the elements viewed as shaping children’s responses to educational success.

1.3.3 Learning Dialogues The research team designed two learning dialogues sessions that included four prompts, in order to engage students for sharing their insights regarding their thoughts about learning and educational aspirations. These classroom-based activities prompted students to articulate their thoughts about their learning in school and more broadly outside of school. This research tool was initially created by Yelland prior to the start of the Global Childhoods project and built on her work with children having an opportunity to contribute directly to data collection in research studies (e.g. Yelland & Rubin, 2002) and trialled in 2014–2015 in a Victoria University funded pilot study (Yelland & Bartholomaeus, 2021). The rich results revealed this as a valuable data source that was highly regarded by the teachers as a reflective learning activity and valuable in understanding students’ orientations to success. Further, it gave the children the opportunity to comment directly into the research process. The provocations were modified for the Global Childhoods project and included the following posed to the children in each global city: Monday morning: 1. What are you looking forward to at school this week? 2. How do you feel you are going at school? Friday morning: 1. What did you learn at school this week? Was it hard to learn or easy to learn? And did you enjoy it? 2. What job do you want to do when you leave school? In this study, we invited the Year 4 students to do a first learning dialogue by reflecting on their own learning in the classroom in the beginning of the school year during our

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first week of classroom ethnographies. When we returned to the classrooms/schools to spend a second week with the same group of students, we invited them to do a second learning dialogue to share and reflect on their aspirations in/through education. These learning dialogues provided a window of opportunity for us to understand how students see themselves as learners and their aspirations of future/forward looking as a way to understand educational success.

1.3.4 Lifeworld Re-enactments Pink and Leder Mackley contend that “To research everyday ethnography we need to be ‘in there’ and part of the very flow of life that we are researching” (2014, p. 146). To access domains of everyday lives, Pink (2009) developed an in situ technique of reenactments, wherein participants are filmed as they explain daily routines (Pink & Leder Mackley, 2014). Yelland had trialled the re-enactments approach in 2015, which were then utilised by the team for this study in Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore. This enabled us to document and understand children’s routines after school and at weekends by talking with them and recording their explanations of their everyday practices in situ (at their homes outside of the classroom/school in the community). Pink contends that such re-enactments “bridge the gap between representation and action. It involves doing, imagining, and representing and thus invites us to ask questions about what it is then that we are seeking to access” (2014, p. 153). Our ethnographers met the student and parent at school and went to their home with them one day after school. We were able to include a boy and a girl from each school in Hong Kong, a girl and a boy from one school in Melbourne and a girl from one school in Singapore. With the generosity of the families, our ethnographers were granted permission to interview and document the child’s “typical” afterschool hours with his or her families/carers/parents. In some cases, the child and his/her family would take us on a walk in the neighbourhood for the re-enactment of their lifeworlds out of the school contexts. These episodes of re-enactments allowed the 9–10 year olds to share their lifeworlds outside of school hours to enable us to see the messy, complex and interconnected webs of learning and living experiences in three global cities. In addition to these research instruments, throughout the project we conducted inter-cultural and cross-cultural policy analyses. Our project approached policy analysis by focusing on current local and global reform trends, national reform agendas, mandates and school-based policy enactment and policy cultures in each location. Our cross-cultural research team drew on the team researchers’ expertise and indepth sociocultural knowledge of the policy contexts (Lee, 2016; Lee & Tseng, 2013; Saltmarsh, 2015a, 2015b) to unpack how children’s lifeworlds are shaped by policy discourses as well as shaping the formations of new policies. In our intercultural and cross-cultural policy analyses, we pay critical attentions in re-reading and unpacking the nuanced political, social, cultural and historical meanings of the policies by acknowledging the intricated web(s) of power/knowledge relations in

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which policy discourses are circulated and circulating. Our approach to policy analysis across the three global cities in this project is not rooted in a positivist paradigm of comparative education. Collecting both quantitative and qualitative data, this research incorporated quantitative analyses of survey data which focused on exploring between-city differences in student responses, and within-city differences between student groups. Our qualitative analyses of written and transcribed data include coding, content and thematic analysis of the classroom ethnographies, learning dialogues and re-enactments and comparative and theoretical analysis of policy documents; and ethnographic field notes will be analysed using theories of policy and culture (Ahearne, 2009, 2011; de Certeau, 1988/2002, 1997; Highmore, 2006). In this way, we were able to capture a rich array of viewpoints and narratives that were invaluable for analysing cultural meaning-making practices and their effects in the everyday lifeworlds of children in the three global cities. Our theoretical analysis used cultural theories to identify and explain how policy cultures shape particular perspectives and practices of curricula, pedagogies and out-of-school activities.

1.4 Conclusions The Global Childhoods project investigated the ways in which children’s orientation to educational success is shaped in their lifeworlds, and how this relates to Australian and Asian policy cultures as well as the public schooling systems. In so doing, the chapters in this book aim to offer insights intended to assist policy-makers, educational leaders, teachers, researchers and parents to better understand how children’s different and multiple sociocultural networks are connected by their lives inside and outside of schools. In Chapter 2, Saltmarsh discusses the conceptual terrain and context of the study, bringing key concepts such as global cities, global childhoods and everyday practices into dialogue. She explores how visual texts, built and natural environments, and the representational and spatial practices in relation to them, contribute to dynamic meanings about contemporary childhoods in global cities. She also shows how everyday life and cultural practices are porous to experiences, imaginaries and practices from elsewhere, arguing that the “practiced place” (Certeau, 1984, p. 98) and porosity of global cities, their built and natural environments, their public and private spaces, and the lifeworlds of their inhabitants, are everywhere entangled with global events and their shaping of a shared world history. In Chapter 3, Waghorn, Bartholomaeus and Yelland draw on a Bourdieusian approach with reference to the concept of “scholarly habitus” (Watkins, 2005) to understand Year 4 students’ sociocultural dispositions for academic performance and achievement. Exploring and examining two exhibits concerning the school context questionnaires from two international high-steak tests Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), this chapter offers a reflection and an exploratory analysis to seek

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additional understanding of how children’s dispositions to learning relate to the orientations to education “success”. In Chapter 4, Crome and Saltmarsh unpacked the education policies across the national contexts in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore to discuss how national visions as expressed in the policies about children’s learning have been constructed. Drawing from Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality, this chapter focuses on how visuals and policy texts articulate “what” and “who” is being taught in a nation’s “formal” school curriculum to reiterate ideologically inflected social and economic narratives in educational reforms. In Chapter 5, Lee, Leung, Lim, Soo, Karthikeyan, Bartholomaeus and Yelland take a closer look at everyday classroom practices across the three global cities. The authors draw on the classroom ethnography data to provide a picture of what learning looks like in each global city. This chapter does not claim to offer a “grand” narrative to paint a universal truth about children’s learning in the three global cities. Rather, we offer these “examples” from the classrooms and schools as provocations for teachers, parents and policy-makers to rethink how schooling experiences are shaping children’s be(com)ing. In Chapter 6, Bartholomaeus, Chan, Yelland and Karthikeyan look at children’s everyday lifeworlds in their homes and communities during out-of-school hours. Tapping into the online survey and afterschool re-enactments, Bartholomaeus et al. discuss children’s activities on weekdays after school and weekends to understand their engagements and enjoyment of these activities to provide a fuller and closer reflection on children’s lifeworlds. In Chapter 7, Saltmarsh, Lee and Yelland investigate the formation and construction of educational and future success in the three global cities by examining the written and visual texts that are circulating inside and outside the domains of education field. Seeking to destabilise the taken-for-granted construction of success, this chapter takes a critical perspective to analyse several influential educational policies and curriculum reforms from education department websites for each of the three global cities. Seeing that educational policy intersects with children and their families’ aspirations of success in the future, this chapter problematises how contemporary edu-business contributes to scaffold selected sociocultural imaginations as the potential for children’s successful futures. Additionally, this chapter also looks into children’s own written comments and illustrations to understand how and what they think about their everyday learning and their goals or aspirations of their own futures. In Chapter 8, Yelland and Lee seek to provide deep and critical reflections of the Global Childhoods project. In addition to summarise the main points of the project, we reflect on our findings in relation to the impacts and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and children’s learning and living. The chapters in the collection reflect a wide range of geographical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives of the Global Childhoods project to offer insights concerning features of education policy, and everyday school and out-of-school contexts across the three global cities. This final chapter seeks to reiterate the importance of not being fixed with the production of a universal childhood and be critical of how dominant discourses about educational

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and future success are assembled to shift our schooling and education practices while the contexts of children’s everyday lifeworlds are changing. It is important to note that our data collection in the three global cities was conducted during the years 2018–2019. In Australia and Singapore, the school year commences at the start of the calendar year, while in Hong Kong it commenced in the final week of August. We thus completed the surveys with the Hong Kong Year 4 students who were in their first term of Year 4 while in Singapore and Melbourne they were in their final term of the year. We completed the first week of our ethnographic study in Hong Kong in the students’ first term and then completed the second “round” in the first half of the following year. In Singapore and Melbourne, the ethnographies commenced in the next calendar year with the new cohort of students and occurred in each of the two semesters. This proved to be fortuitous for the project since the data collection in Hong Kong was completed prior to the civil unrest that occurred in that city during 2019 resulting in school closures, while in Singapore and Melbourne the data collection was completed prior to the pandemic and the subsequent disruption to schooling in both locations. In each of the locations, school authorities still have not allowed researchers in schools as they gradually re-opened, due to the ongoing pandemic conditions warranting careful monitoring of personnel attending schools. In this way, our classroom observations as school ethnographies, and afterschool re-enactments were recorded prior to the COVID-19 global pandemic. We acknowledge that the scenes of classroom learning and children’s lifeworlds have changed and/or at least significantly been re-shaped due to major impact and disruptions associated with city lockdowns, border closures and whole school shutdowns. However, we are glad that we are able to have this record of lifeworlds in the three global cities prior to such a major global event which has re-shaped many takenfor-granted aspects of research, international travel and everyday life. During the COVID-19 pandemic years, children’s lifeworlds both in and out of schools have been re(con)figured as our ways of living and interacting have been significantly changed and modified. Therefore, our intention in this research was never about depicting or capturing the universal “truth” or “norm” of children’s lifeworlds, or to provide a narrow definition of what constitutes the definition and meaning of educational success. Instead, we see the stories and narratives from our data as timely for reflecting different sociocultural practices that are fluid and subject to change, even as we continue to (re)invent and unpack what learning entails and may mean for children in these changing times. This book is a testament to the lifeworlds of the children who participated in our study, and is to be followed with three additional books that enable a deeper exploration of each of the global cities of Singapore, Melbourne and Hong Kong.

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Chapter 2

Out and About in Global Cities Sue Saltmarsh

Abstract This chapter considers childhood in the context of global cities, taking the space of the city as a site of everyday life and its multiplicity of cultural practices. Informed by cultural theory concerned with spatial practices, the practice of place, and the ways that everyday life is implicated in the formation of culture (Certeau, 1984), and drawing on the work of scholars from the transdisciplinary field of global studies, the chapter explores how social imaginaries of the global city are enmeshed within broader contexts, cultures and world events. Through a discussion of city spaces, events and activities available to children in the public spaces of global cities, local histories and everyday practices of art, politics, play and culture are shown to extend beyond what might otherwise be designated as “local”, and to instead be porous to the space and time of elsewhere. Images from galleries, museums and parks illustrate multiple entanglements between embodied practices in children’s lifeworlds and social imaginaries of global childhoods, which in turn take place in dialogue with dynamic global forces that continue to shape social imaginaries of global childhoods. Keywords Global childhoods · Global cities · Spatial practices · Porosity · Lifeworlds A concern of the Global Childhoods project has been the ways that education policy and practices intersect with children’s everyday school experiences and their learning and lives beyond the classroom. The research has endeavoured to better understand these intersections, and it brings two key concepts—global cities and global childhoods—into dialogue, contributing both to empirical and theoretical aspects of the study. This chapter considers how these concepts, together with theories of spatial and representational practices, can be drawn upon to inform our thinking about how everyday childhoods, global cities and researcher positionalities intersect to S. Saltmarsh (B) Department of Early Childhood Education, The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I-F. Lee et al. (eds.), Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities, Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0_2

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shape understandings about the texts and practices of place and space. Following this discussion of some of the conceptual terrain (Certeau, 1984; Pink, 2015; Sassen, 2005; Wolfrum, 2018) in which the study is located, the chapter explores how visual texts, built and natural environments contribute to dynamic and continually evolving meanings about contemporary childhoods in global cities. Ethnographic studies for the Global Childhoods project were conducted in Hong Kong, Singapore and Melbourne, which we have referred to, following Saskia Sassen (2005), as “global cities”. Perhaps not surprisingly, the transdisciplinary field of global studies has not reached consensus around its central terms, constructs and features, hence it is important to note that these remain the subject of ongoing debate (Steger & James, 2019). Sassen’s (2005) concern with global cities usefully spans a broad range of economic, financial, technological, social and geopolitical domains characterised by “networked cross-border dynamics” (p. 40), and cities are understood as central sites around which these dynamics coalesce. This view of cities is about more than their function as financial hubs for global markets. As Sassen (2005) points out, “Major cities have emerged as a strategic site not only for global capital, but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of translocal communities and identities” (p. 38). This thinking is of course situated against the broader backdrop of contemporary globalisation, and the predominance of neoliberal terms and rationalities that cast it primarily in economic terms. While an in-depth discussion of globalisation will not be undertaken here, it is important to note that globalisation has a long history (Sachs, 2020), and is hardly a new phenomenon. However, its configuration in recent decades has placed “tremendous pressure on local settings and institutions such as schools and universities, on the very nature of intellectual and pedagogical processes, and on the social subjects and lived communities formed in these domains” (Goel et al., 2021, p. 641). The persistent emphasis on the centrality of markets significantly contributes to: the view that globalization is largely an economic phenomenon, in which markets play a fundamental role in reconfiguring the nature of social relations. So globally ubiquitous has this mode of thinking become that it can appropriately be referred to as a “social imaginary”. (Rizvi, 2017, p. 1)

Indeed, neoliberal social imaginaries that give primacy to global markets (and the wealth and power that accrue to them) have played no small part in the reconfiguration of social processes such as education in market terms in recent decades. But these imaginaries, it should be remembered, are also intertwined with other imaginaries of place and culture that long preceded those of globalised markets. This is particularly true of cities, and Sassen’s positioning of global cities as sites not just of commerce and trade, but of community and culture, calls to mind the ways that cities have come to represent a vast array of competing and contrasting ideals and imaginaries. Literature, for example, as von der Thüsen (2005) points out “has both celebrated the city as the supreme expression of wealth, of energy, of the amalgam of living styles and, conversely, as representative of modern society’s ills, its anonymity, egotism, oppression and anxiety” (p. 2). Sassen’s positioning of global cities as sites

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of community and culture calls to mind the long history of cities as places of human activity, and the relationships between people and place that refuse to be defined in wholly economic terms, such that “On the symbolic level, the city is seen as an image of something larger than the city itself” (von der Thüsen, 2005, p. 1). Importantly, Highmore (2014) cautions against trying to understand notions of the city in ways that would “separate the physical presence of the city from all those metaphors, tropes, and complexes of representation through which the city is lived” (p. 26). Thus, in this consideration of global cities, social, spatial, symbolic and physical (both natural and built) structures are understood as being porous (Wolfrum et al., 2018) to one another, to global forces, and to the interconnected web of people, practices, histories and politics of both “here” and “elsewhere”.

2.1 Childhoods, Education and Global Cities in Dialogue But what of childhoods in the metaphorical and material contexts of global cities? The sociology of childhood has done much to shift understandings about the changing nature of childhood both as a social construct and as a relational category of lived experience, or as Prout and James (1990) put it, “the social institution of childhood: an actively negotiated set of social relationships within which the early years of human life are constituted” (p. 7). Understanding childhood in this way invites considerations of the discursive interplay between context, culture, representation and experience— in other words, between the material, symbolic and affective aspects of childhood in “the practices of everyday life” (Certeau, 1984) and its relational, spatiotemporal and geopolitical domains. While the focus of the Global Childhoods project is on childhoods in global cities, it is important to note that the impact of global forces is not felt only in cities. Indeed, as Karen Wells (2021) rightly points out, the reach of global forces extends to political economies, childhoods and lifeworlds everywhere. Of particular interest here, however, are the ways that discourses of childhood in global cities reflect a different kind of “normative global child” (Cregan & Cuthbert, 2014) than that which emerged out of children’s rights, welfare and protection-based discourses that underpin the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989), and which are at the centre of numerous child advocacy campaigns and interventions in which childhood is invoked “as a kind of sacred icon of global civil society” (Nieuwenhuys, 2010, p. 294). A wide range of visual and policy texts, including those from the study sites of Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia (e.g.: Crome & Saltmarsh, 2022; Saltmarsh & Lee, 2021), also construct the normative child in terms that are less concerned with childhoods in need of improved rights and material conditions, and more focused on conveying a sense of childhood as a site of optimism, opportunity, enjoyment and self-actualisation. For example, Saltmarsh and Lee (2021) observe that many early childhood education policy texts pertaining to children, education, learning and play, rely heavily on depictions of smiling, laughing, happy children “as though happiness can be both

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assumed and obliged” (p. 308). The normative child in this respect is constructed in ways that overtly suggest and tacitly imply that individual success and happiness are co-implicated, and fall within the purview of governments to secure for national social and economic benefit. Within these contexts, the pervasiveness of contemporary neoliberal ideals in what Wells (2021) refers to as a particularly Western “globalizing model of childhood” (p. 13), highlights the persistence of economic discourse across multiple domains of everyday life. Wells (2021) argues that “This model of childhood constructs healthy childhood as one that orientates children towards independence rather than interdependence and towards school-based rather than work-based learning, and separates them from the wider forces of politics, economy and society” (p. 13). Indeed, a key epistemological concern of this project lies in how these pervasive discourses tether learning and economic participation to well-being and success, taking inadequate account of the “multiplicity of cultural places” (Certeau, 1997, p. 66, original emphasis) across which agentive, meaningful lifeworlds traverse. For Sassen (2004), it is noted that global cities also “help people experience themselves as part of global nonstate networks as they live their daily lives. They enact some version of the global in the micro-spaces of daily life rather than on some putative global stage” (p. 651). For children growing up in the porosity of global cities (Wolfrum, 2018; Wolfrum et al., 2018; Zöhrer, 2018), the spaces and activities of everyday lifeworlds are porous to the ubiquity of “elsewhere”, and the international “flows” of people, capital, technologies, images and ideas (Appadurai, 1996) that give global cities their distinctive character. But they are also porous to local ways of being, knowing and doing, to culturally specific as well as culturally diverse logics and practices, positionalities, histories and anticipated futures within which the “here and now” is also situated. It is here, in the intersection and interconnectedness between the global and the local, that we can explore dimensions of lifeworlds that are available to children in the public spaces, activities and events of global cities. Such a consideration is necessarily partial and incomplete, reflecting the impermanence that characterises images and activities in public domains, disparities of social, cultural and financial capital that so often determine access and participation, as well as the contingent and serendipitous nature of so much ethnographic work (Rivoal & Salazar, 2013). The following section begins with a brief discussion of the theoretical and methodological orientations to this topic, before turning to a consideration of everyday images from cities where the Global Childhoods project was conducted.

2.2 Walking in Cities: Researching (In, and Out of) Place The analysis undertaken in this chapter is informed by cultural theories that emphasise the importance of moving across epistemological borders and boundaries, acknowledging that “The practices of knowledge are always trans-disciplinary in the sense that they involve contexts, methods, and instruments institutionally assigned to

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different disciplines” (Bergonzi et al., 2014, p. 416). Transdisciplinary knowledge work has considerable resonance with the Global Childhoods project, which has involved a team of transnational collaborators researching in global cities. This chapter focuses on the ways that the metaphor of travel has been taken up in the humanities and social sciences to explore the connections between conceptual and geographic mobilities. Kenway and Fahey (2009), for example, refer to this in terms of the “travelling research imagination”, which they see as involving both “epistemological and geographical travel” (p. 10). The metaphor of travel is an important one not just for researching across transnational and epistemological borders, but also for the analysis of cultural texts, signalling how theoretical concepts “can now travel across disciplines creating an extended field of contemporary cultural thinking” (Pollock & Bal, 2007, p. xv). In this way of thinking, then, travel “becomes the unstable ground of cultural analysis” (Bal, 2007, p. 1), as the nature of interdisciplinary inquiry not only constructs objects in particular ways, but also unsettles, unmakes and reconfigures both the original conceptions of the objects as well as the questions that have been asked in relation to them. Here we are particularly interested in how visual methodologies and ethnographic techniques can be brought into “encounter” (Pollock & Bal, 2007) in ways that simultaneously construct, problematise and rethink cultural texts and practices from multiple perspectives. As cultural analyst Bal (2007) argues, “You do not apply one method; you conduct a meeting between several, a meeting in which the object participates so that, together, object and methods can become a new, not firmly delineated, field” (p. 1). Recognising that analysis is itself implicated in constructing its objects of inquiry, such an approach is not inconsistent with that of Certeau, for whom methodology “is a way of being in, and communicating with and about the world—a contact zone for the writing of culture, rather than the analysing of culture per se” (Saltmarsh, 2015, p. 34). As is the case with the Global Childhoods project, this orientation acknowledges the work of research collaborators in creating, collecting, archiving and interpreting visual texts of relevance to a particular study as itself a cultural practice. This enables researchers to query their own research traditions and positionalities, and to investigate how cultural images and practices might be brought into encounter with broader social landscapes and imaginaries in multiple ways, rather than—as is sometimes the case in transnational studies— endeavouring to compare sites, or alternatively, to produce coherent narratives about each study site. Such an approach supports considerations of the ways in which multiplicities of place and culture in everyday life intersect with multiplicities of researcher perspectives, and the implications of these multiplicities for international and interdisciplinary research practice. As interdisciplinary researchers interested in the connections between childhood, education and culture, our team’s research in global cities has necessarily involved engagement with questions of travel in this epistemological sense, which in turn informs thinking here with respect to the embodied practices of space and place. For Pink (2015), “the idea of place as lived but open invokes the inevitable question of how researchers themselves are entangled in, participate in the production of, and are co-present in the ethnographic places they share with research participants, their

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materialities and power relations” (pp. 33–34). Travelling to, between and within the lived but open places of global cities is one means by which we can experience and stage encounters between these “shared entanglements” (Pink, 2015), in both a geographical and epistemological sense. The public spaces of playgrounds, shopping centres, museums and galleries, train stations, buses and city streets are familiar to those on our research team, both in the places where each live and work, as well as those in which they may only be temporary visitors. They have also, at different points in the collaboration, occupied spaces as outsiders “looking in”, and at other times, as insiders “looking out”. Like other inhabitants and visitors, they are, as Certeau (1984) puts it “ordinary practitioners of the city” (p. 93), for whom spatiality can be understood not just as a site or category of analysis, but as also entangled within “a larger cultural construct incorporating the play between social, imagined and represented spaces” (Pollock, 2003, p. xxxv). Certeau’s consideration of walking through the city illustrates how walkers use, and therefore create the space of the city as a “practiced place”: if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities … then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. (1984, p. 98)

Importantly, the “practices of place” by various members of our research team as they have walked through global cities, observed, photographed and later compared images, ideas and interpretations, continue to work their way into research publications that endeavour to narrate these observations, experiences and meaning-making practices. Yet, Certeau (1984) notes that these “stories about places are makeshift things” whose “heterogeneous and even contrary elements fill the homogeneous form of the story” (p. 107). To further explain, Certeau notes: Things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) insert themselves into the accepted framework, the imposed order. One thus has the very relationship between spatial practices and the constructed order. The surface of this order is everywhere punched and torn open by ellipses, drifts, and leaks of meaning: it is a sieve-order. (1984, p. 107)

So it is that ethnographers, in particular, undertake spatial practices that are partial and fragmentary, and whose meanings and “leaks of meanings” tell partial stories. These, in turn, may involve serendipitous, unplanned or accidental moments in field research (Fujii, 2014; Rivoal & Salazar, 2013), the importance of which “lies not in what they tell us about the particular, but what they suggest about the larger political and social world in which they (and the researcher) are embedded” (Fujii, 2014, p. 525). These embedded stories and entanglements occur in dialogue with the everyday “public habitat of images” (Rose, 1999, p. 86), both informing and informed by the broader global flow not only of neoliberal rationalities but also individual, familial, cultural and social practices of place, everyday life and childhoods in global cities.

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2.3 Out and About: Spaces, Places and Times For many, the very concept of a city calls to mind its provision in the public domain— those locations, buildings, structures, institutions and public facilities that exist beyond the private spaces of homes and the shared yet relatively contained spaces of schools and classrooms. However, architects and urban planners argue for an understanding of cities as porous (Wolfrum et al., 2018), with the notion of porosity helping to bridge “architectural features and qualities of the built environment on the one side and the socially produced space of a complex urban society on the other” (Wolfrum, 2018, p. 17). Chapters in this and other volumes in this series address questions of children’s everyday lives, documenting examples of homelife through re-enactments of their after-school activities, and through ethnographic visits to their schools and classrooms. Through that work, we considered the intersections and considerable porosity between children’s school and out-of-school activities. However, this section builds on the idea of porosity to suggest that just as the spaces between public and private, natural and built, learning and leisure, are porous, so too are the encounters and “shared entanglements” (Pink, 2015) that take place within and in relation to them. These may be physical encounters with co-present others, such as when attending sport or playing at the park, or they may be a/synchronous, technologically mediated encounters with others. In addition to the porosity created through television, movies, internet and other popular culture in global circulation, porosity between self and other/elsewhere can also occur through shared or intersecting histories, music, art and other sites of meaning-making and the making of lifeworlds. The analysis that follows considers examples from, first, galleries and museums, providing brief snapshots of the ways that children are invited to engage, together with their families, in local and global entanglements. The analysis then moves on to consider outdoor play spaces, and the ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has not only shaped what is or is not possible under shifting public health restrictions, but has also brought entanglements between local and global into sharp focus in the everyday lives of children growing up in global cities. The images below, taken in 2019 during a visit to Hong Kong, and then Singapore, provide a small sample of ways in which visitors to galleries and museums are invited to engage with both local and global. At the National Gallery of Singapore (NGS), for example, children and families walk together through a wide range of artworks, artefacts and exhibits, some of which are interactive and others which are experienced as architectural features. For example, the walkway in Figs. 2.1 and 2.2 begins with a wooden ramp up to a plexiglass covered opening that creates the optical illusion of stepping into/onto a starry void, followed by another that leads over the top of carefully curated artefacts and seemingly endless stacks of books. The illusion creates a sense of self in relation to a broader universe of stars and endless space, but also of human history, art and literature.

26 Fig. 2.1 Walkway over illusion of starry void, NGS

Fig. 2.2 Walkway over artifacts and stacked books, NGS

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Fig. 2.3 Music installation, NGS

Fig. 2.4 Art talk with visitors to NGS

Figure 2.3, on the other hand, is an interactive music installation as part of the second Gallery Children’s Biennale held in 2019,1 with soft balls that children can throw at the chimes to create musical sounds. Through engagements with activities and events such as these hosted by public galleries, museums and so on, “the uniqueness or new-ness of the materiality of a museum can open up possibilities for the unexpected, or for improvisatory practice to unfold” (Hackett et al., 2018, p. 484). Similarly, Fig. 2.4 shows a scene with a speaker giving a participatory public talk to visiting children and parents on the political nature of art, inviting them to think about the ways that certain sculptures and paintings might cause visitors to the gallery to think about people and ideas that impact on lives in different parts of the world.

1

https://www.nationalgallery.sg/see-do/programme-detail/28983205/gallery-children039s-bie nnale-2019-embracing-wonder.

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Families accompany children through these installations and activities, a reminder that meaning-making practices in these public spaces are not just individual experiences, but are shaped in the context of the visitor group. As Kirk and Buckingham have elaborated “the children are visiting the museum within the social context of their families, and other members of the group influence many aspects of the children’s lives, including their interests and areas of focus within the museum” (2018, p. 59). To this could be added, that these shared experiences with families and others speak also to shared encounters with life beyond home and family, and the significance of these to children’s everyday lifeworlds. A similar example from Hong Kong pertains to the exhibition titled “Botticelli and His Times”2 was a highly anticipated public event in Hong Kong following a monthslong period in which public museums, galleries, playgrounds and other facilities had been closed in the Hong Kong government’s efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. For children and families in Hong Kong, including those who participated in our study, and members of our research team, getting “out and about” in their global city had been significantly curtailed, due to lockdowns, school closures and other measures impacting on the daily lives of Hong Kong residents. The exhibition marked an important collaboration between the Hong Kong Museum of Art (MOA) and the Ufizzi Gallery in Florence, Italy, and featured works by Botticelli, Perugino, di Credi and other Italian Renaissance masters. Attending had the air of celebration—despite the necessary electronic sign-ins and social distancing measures—and brought spatial practices of the city into dialogue with the travel of images and ideas. As visitors made their way past the final artworks in the exhibition, they came upon an interactive display, featuring easels and drawing supplies, walls bearing openings surrounded by empty frames through which they could have their photos taken, and a life-size cut-out of Lorenzo di Credi’s Venus, next to which was placed a rack of clothing items that children could use to clothe the largely naked Venus (Figs. 2.5–2.8). The quiet solemnity of the exhibition showcasing some of Europe’s most significant art works, gave way to this playful, interactive space, and in so doing created encounters in which children could exercise agency and creativity as participants in a global art event. The humour of dressing the naked Venus with modern-day clothing was not lost on children, and there was much amusement as they conferred with parents and siblings, transforming the nude Venus into a parody sporting an array of sneakers, t-shirts and other items. In the immediate moment, the elsewhere was not elsewhere at all—its porosity was entangled with the local and the tangible, rendering it malleable within the terms of children growing up in a contemporary Asian global city. Just as porosity in cities can be seen and experienced in carefully curated interior architectural spaces, it is also at work in other, less formal spaces such as gardens, parks and other venues for outdoor leisure. Parks and play areas designed for children are a good example, given the extent to which they are frequented by families, offering 2

https://hk.art.museum/en_US/web/ma/exhibitions-and-events/botticelli-and-his-times-master works-from-the-uffizi.html.

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Fig. 2.5 Interactive display for children’s drawing, MOA

Fig. 2.6 Interactive display with replica of Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Woman, MOA

an informal relational space for family time, where children can run, climb and play. Zöhrer describes the porosity between private and public in this way: With the aim of enabling communication, interaction, and improvisation, the concept of the porous city provides architecturally designed elements of pervasion and multiple-coded spaces on all different levels and scales. These elements are not buildings, objects, or architectural artifacts but rather thresholds or transitions, created as relational spaces connecting the inside with the outside or the private with the public. (2018, pp. 58–59)

What may be interesting to consider is the extent to which such spaces also function in the porosity between here and elsewhere. In global cities such as Hong Kong, cultural diversity is woven into the everyday, and linguistic, ethnic, socioeconomic and other categories of difference are porous to interconnected histories and continually renegotiated cultures both local and global. A useful example is seen in the parks and playgrounds closed off from public use for extended periods of time after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Benches where parents, grandparents and

30 Fig. 2.7 Choosing clothes for replica of Lorenzo di Credi’s Venus, MOA

Fig. 2.8 Dressing replica of Lorenzo di Credi’s Venus, MOA

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helpers typically sit while children play on equipment were largely roped off, sometimes leaving available room for only one person to sit. Not that it much mattered, because playground equipment, too, was taped or netted to prevent its use, as seen in Figs. 2.9–2.12 below. As noted elsewhere in this edited collection, when the Global Childhoods project commenced, the fieldwork was conducted prior to several major events that would subsequently contribute to our thinking about the changing nature of childhood both as a social construct and as a relational category of lived experience. Walking through Hong Kong’s many parks during the pandemic, I have watched with interest as children wearing masks play with balls, scooters and bikes, as roped off playgrounds function as perpetual if silent reminders of the intersection of the local with the global. For children and families, the closure of outdoor spaces was also coextensive with school closures and social distancing measures, restricting play, interaction and the practice of place in everyday lifeworlds—a disruption between “spatial practices and the constructed order” (Certeau, 1984, p. 107). Recent research conducted in Europe (e.g. Venter et al., 2020; Weinbrenner et al., 2021) and in global cities in Asia (e.g. Lu et al., 2021), shows that for many families affected by pandemic restrictions, public outdoor spaces were practised in a variety of ways. In some cases, proximity to nature parks and urban forest during lockdowns and social distancing measures offered alternatives both for social interaction as well as engagement with the natural world as a site of exercise, learning and creativity:

Fig. 2.9 Netted stairs on children’s play equipment in a Hong Kong playground during pandemic

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Fig. 2.10 Roped off slide on Hong Kong children’s playground during pandemic

Fig. 2.11 Hong Kong children’s playground blocked from access during pandemic

for many families that had to care for their children at home, the forest became a kindergarten and a playground. Many young participants no longer met with friends in cafés but in the forest. Gyms were moved into the forest. Off the trails, people used tree stumps to meditate on them. By providing many opportunities for very different activities, the forest serves as a substitute—or functional equivalent—on many levels. (Weinbrenner et al., 2021, n.p.)

Even during periods when facilities such as play equipment were inaccessible, the use of green spaces increased during the pandemic, and has been associated with social resilience and a greater sense of social cohesion (Lu et al., 2021).

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Fig. 2.12 Roped off ramp leading onto children’s play equipment on Hong Kong playground during pandemic

The porosity of the city, its built and natural environments and its public and private spaces, and the lifeworlds of its inhabitants, are everywhere entangled with global events and their shaping of a shared world history. Here, in parks and playgrounds restricted from use, is an example of how even that which is closed off, visible yet inaccessible, can function in terms of the “lived but open” (Pink, 2015, p. 33) space of the global city. Elsewhere, I have argued (Saltmarsh, 2022) that childhood, both as a social category and constructed imaginary, is necessarily inseparable from the broader actualities within which it is situated. In order to understand the porosity of global cities (Wolfrum, 2018), one needs to only look into the ways that “here” and “elsewhere” are entangled in both tangible and symbolic ways at sites designed for and used by children.

2.4 Conclusion Being “out and about” is part of the everyday lifeworlds of children growing up in global cities. While the term “global cities” is used throughout this book in reference to the cities where the Global Childhoods project was conducted, it is important to acknowledge the porosity within and between the cities at the centre of our research. As images from galleries, museums and parks illustrate, the spatial practices of children and families in these global cities are enmeshed in broader contexts, cultures and world events than what might otherwise be designated as “local”. Similarly, local histories and everyday practices of art, politics, play and culture speak into the space and time of elsewhere. This chapter, therefore, suggests a reconsideration of such dichotomies, drawing instead on notions of porosity and entanglement, in order to explore multiple entanglements between the ways that embodied everyday practices in children’s lifeworlds take place in dialogue with dynamic global forces that continue to shape social imaginaries of global childhoods.

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Chapter 3

Exploring the Scholarly Habitus in Children’s Lifeworlds: High-Stakes Testing and Educational Capital Elise Waghorn , Clare Bartholomaeus , and Nicola Yelland

Abstract The East Asian countries continue to rate highly in terms of average achievement scores for Year 4 students in the international high-stakes tests Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). In this chapter, we consider the ways in which the TIMSS and PIRLS context questionnaires not only provide an important background to the average achievement scores, but also enable further discussion of children’s lifeworlds in different locations. We draw on the concept of the scholarly habitus (e.g. Watkins & Noble in Disposed to learn: Schooling, ethnicity and the scholarly habitus. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) to explore two exhibits constructed from the school context questionnaires completed by principals as examples: entering school with literacy and numeracy skills and school emphasis on academic success. We explore some of the dimensions of scholarly habitus to consider practices that might help to contribute to students’ academic engagement. This allows us to consider diversity between and within locations, including making connections to the local contexts, such as early childhood education and parent responses to education reform in the locations. Ultimately, we argue that the TIMSS and PIRLS context questionnaire data can be engaged with in new ways to spark a broader discussion of children’s everyday lifeworlds in local contexts. Keywords High-stakes testing · TIMSS · PIRLS · Children’s lifeworlds · Scholarly habitus · Educational capital

E. Waghorn (B) · C. Bartholomaeus · N. Yelland Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Bartholomaeus e-mail: [email protected] N. Yelland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I-F. Lee et al. (eds.), Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities, Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0_3

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Average achievement scores from international high-stakes testing have been used as both an indicator of the relative “success” of schooling systems and a mechanism or justification for educational reform in many nations worldwide, albeit in complex ways (e.g. Fischman et al., 2019; Klemenˇciˇc et al., 2018; Volante, 2018). Internationally, at the primary school level, these tests are implemented in Year 4 in both the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (also in Year 8) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with 15-year-olds (implemented by the OECD) also receives significant attention in policy and academic debates, with many of the critical arguments pertaining to PISA also relevant to TIMSS and PIRLS. The data produced in these high-stakes tests is often appealing to governments and education bureaucrats (Fischman et al., 2019) because their numeric outcomes, constructed via seemingly straightforward scores and rankings, enable simple comparisons between systems thus creating an artificial simplification of children’s learning outcomes (Gorur & Wu, 2015). For example, East Asian locations, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, continue to rank highly in terms of average achievement scores for Year 4 students in the TIMSS and PIRLS tests, and consequently are often regarded as being examples of “successful” education systems (e.g. Waldow et al., 2014). Frequently, in the quest for simplification, the complexities of considering children’s lifeworlds holistically are ignored, even though there are a number of context questionnaires in TIMSS and PIRLS that produce data about various aspects of children’s lives which might contribute to such discussions. We are also inspired by Gorur’s work which critically engages with many of the assumptions underpinning high-stakes testing. While her discussions often focus on PISA, they are also relevant to TIMSS and PIRLS. For example, she criticises the way in which socioeconomic status is often controlled for in these tests, ignoring students’ backgrounds and instead focusing on teacher quality: “[o]ne of the most impactful findings from PISA has been with regard to teacher quality and its impact on student performance. Teacher effects are surmised on the basis of isolating other factors statistically, using regression analysis” (Gorur, 2016, p. 663. See also Gale & Parker, 2017). Yet, children’s lifeworlds beyond school receive little attention amidst the focus on the academic results produced from the tests and, when they are considered, tend to be statistical analyses that attempt to identify specific variables that are viewed as contributing to children’s achievement scores on the tests (see, e.g. Chen et al., 2020; Kember, 2016; Yeung et al., 2014). As Gorur argues, high-stakes tests have become an isolated world of their own: Curiously, it appears that the world as described by PISA numbers is so compelling and convincing that analysts ignore what they know about the real world. Most people have heard about the cram-schools in Korea, in which students spend almost as much time as they do in regular school. …. Yet the numbers are presented as a world complete in themselves, ignoring the realities that are before them in the real world. (Gorur, 2016, pp. 664–665)

The influence of high-stakes tests on the structure and provision of schooling, as discussed above, means that it is important to critically engage with unpacking the meanings of these tests. While we approach TIMSS and PIRLS with caution, we

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suggest that some of the data produced relating to context can elucidate a perspective of children’s lifeworlds which has hitherto been given limited attention. This is particularly evident in some locations like Hong Kong and Singapore, where this kind of data is rarely produced and investigated otherwise. In other words, TIMSS and PIRLS data may be useful to work with when they are viewed as specific data sets, alongside other data sets and research, and additional contextual discussions. Both the TIMSS and PIRLS reports include background data in the form of context questionnaires with principals, parents, and students, although, as mentioned above, these have received far less attention by policy-makers, media, and researchers than the academic results produced in the tests. Rather than undertaking a positivist quantitative statistical analysis which examines multiple variables in an attempt to determine the key factors in achievement score “success”, in this chapter we instead offer a reflection on the responses to some context questions from TIMSS and PIRLS with regard to what these may say about children’s lifeworlds. In particular, we offer an exploratory analysis of reading TIMSS and PIRLS through the lens of the scholarly habitus (e.g. Watkins & Noble, 2013) (outlined in the next section), considering children’s dispositions to learning and the ways in which these may impact on children’s academic engagement. In order to explore the concept of scholarly habitus and provoke deeper thinking about the relevance of context in relation to TIMSS and PIRLS data, we draw on two exhibits in the TIMSS and PIRLS reports constructed from the school context questionnaires completed by principals as examples: entering school with literacy and numeracy skills and school emphasis on academic success. We consider this data not only in terms of diversity between locations, but also within locations, including a broader consideration of children’s lifeworlds in the local contexts. Expanding discussions of other chapters in this book that reflect on new data produced in the context of the Global Childhoods project, in this chapter, we broaden and complement the discussion by considering published data from TIMSS and PIRLS provided by principals in the school context questionnaires. We offer reflections on the ways in which these context questionnaire items enable a shift beyond the reporting of average achievement scores, to consider the range of everyday practices that constitute the scholarly habitus which might in turn dispose some students, more than others, to academic engagement because they can draw on their habitus more readily. In the next section, we outline the conceptual frameworks we draw on in this chapter in order to consider children’s learning and everyday life, with a particular focus on lifeworlds and the scholarly habitus (e.g. Watkins & Noble, 2013). We then provide an overview of TIMSS and PIRLS and present the overall average achievement scores which are so often quoted, to provide some background information regarding the testing regimes. Following this, we discuss and reflect on the TIMSS and PIRLS context data through the lens of the scholarly habitus, drawing on two exhibits from the school questionnaires completed by principals, and situating these within the broader contexts of our three locations of Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

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3.1 Children’s Lifeworlds and the Scholarly Habitus: A Bourdieusian Approach The Global Childhoods project explores children’s everyday lifeworlds in the three global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The concept of “lifeworld” has been used in social research to conceptualise people’s lives and experiences, including by Husserl (1970) who focused on consciousness and Habermas (1987) who paid attention to socially and culturally linguistic meanings. Building on the use of the singular lifeworld, we examine children’s lifeworlds in the plural to consider children’s everyday lived practices and contexts. We are interested in exploring children’s everyday lifeworlds at school, at home, and in the community, and the connections between these (Yelland et al., 2017) in order to better understand their experiences and orientations to educational “success” (for more details on the theoretical framing of the project, see Chapter 1 of this book). Our particular focus in this chapter is children’s everyday lifeworlds in terms of the scholarly habitus, a concept devised by Watkins (2005, 2018) and in collaboration with Noble (Watkins & Noble, 2013), through grappling with Bourdieu’s concept of field to understand the students’ different sociocultural dispositions for academic performance and achievement. Bourdieu’s work (e.g. 1984; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) was concerned with the dynamics of power in society and the resultant forms of stratification that he thought were represented and embodied in different forms of practices, or cultures. He conceptualised capital in terms of cultural (embodied as dispositions, objectified as cultural goods e.g. books, and institutionalised e.g. educational qualifications), social (social obligations and connections), and economic (e.g. money, property) (Bourdieu, 1986). Bourdieu (e.g. Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) explored the role of education in relation to maintaining cultural capital which involved a consideration of the learned ways of ensuring “success” in the system via performing different practices. For Bourdieu, these practices became embodied dispositions that individuals could draw on intuitively, which enabled them to “successfully” perform in school. Thus, habitus denotes how these sets of appropriate actions and practices become embedded in their learning repertoire. The use of Bourdieu’s work, particularly on habitus, has been important in understanding connections between children’s lives inside and outside of school (e.g. Connolly, 2004; Lareau, 2011; Reay, 2015). Watkins and Noble (2013) build on this work by conceptualising “educational capital” as “the array of competencies, skills and knowledges that serve these functions within the schooling system” (p. 6). Watkins (2018) defines scholarly habitus as “the embodied dispositions that incline students towards academic engagement” (p. 1241), dispositions that are learnt and practised at home, at school, and in the community, and which impact on children’s learning and engagement at school. More specifically, scholarly habitus is about “[t]he mastery of certain skills, behaviours and knowledges” (Watkins & Noble, 2013, p. 7). Directing attention to the scholarly habitus allows for a focus on the various practices in children’s lives and their engagement in learning, and moves away from

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the reductive approach inherent to attributing performance to innate psychological and biological attributes or socio-demographic factors such as ethnic background. The concept of the scholarly habitus also allows for a consideration of Bourdieu’s distinct fields, where “dispositions… are not simply acquired at school and from within the broader field of education. Dispositions to learning are also acquired within the home both prior to, and concurrent with, a child’s attendance at school” (Watkins, 2018, p. 1244). A scholarly habitus is thus built through a variety of practices, such as, for example, homework, where children can practise the embodied discipline of school work (Watkins, 2018; Watkins & Noble, 2013). As Watkins and Noble (2013) contend, this is not simply about the acquisition of skills, but also about dispositions towards learning and the practices of learning: “[t]his does not just involve the ability to perform certain tasks but the desire to learn and the ability to manage one’s learning” (p. 7). This means that when children come to school, those with more familiarity with a scholarly habitus are likely to feel more comfortable at school and more familiar with the practices required in order to succeed academically (Watkins, 2018). While Bourdieu’s work is sometimes viewed as deterministic, as with Mills (2015), we see his theorising as allowing for “transformative potential”, where change is possible to improve educational outcomes for disadvantaged groups, and fitting with Bourdieu’s concerns about social inequalities (see also Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 135–136). The scholarly habitus may be seen as an ongoing project, constructed in children’s everyday lifeworlds. A consideration of scholarly habitus enables us to explore the dispositions, practices, and contexts that impact on children’s performance in high-stakes tests as one indicator of “successful” schooling outcomes. While Watkins (2018) and Watkins and Noble (2013) sometimes focus on specific embodied practices (e.g. being able to sit still), we view the scholarly habitus as more broadly able to consider the ways in which children’s dispositions to learning can be influenced by their experiences at home, at school, and in the community. One example of this is whether children’s parents have actively engaged them in learning pre-literacy or numeracy skills before starting their first formal year of schooling. This might include having access to a range of books from a young age, parents reading to their children on a daily basis, and/or providing children with ordinary mathematical moments throughout their day.

3.2 Overview of TIMSS and PIRLS Two international high-stakes tests occur when students are in Year 4: Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) (also in Year 8) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). These studies are intentionally designed to enable comparisons between locations and over time, and are based on what are reported as nationally representative samples (Mullis et al., 2017, 2020).

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Both studies are conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Achievement (IEA),1 but are implemented at local levels. While the Global Childhoods project focuses on the three global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore, here we necessarily focus on Australian data, as TIMSS and PIRLS is conducted at the national level in Australia (additional Australian data is only available at the state/territory level). We also note here the critiques around high-stakes testing including a combination of countries, cities, and provinces (e.g. Gorur & Wu, 2015), but all of these are referred to as “countries” in the reports. We follow this from the reports, although sometimes substitute “locations”. While this is beyond the scope of the chapter, it is important to acknowledge that when country data is broken down by jurisdiction, quite different academic test rankings are evident, such as in the case with Australia and PISA (Gorur & Wu, 2015). The first TIMSS test took place in 1995 and has subsequently been conducted every four years (in 1999 it was conducted only with Year 8 students). Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore have all taken part in every TIMSS cycle at the Year 4 and Year 8 levels since its inception (Mullis et al., 2020). At the Year 4 level for TIMSS 2019, students were assessed on content in mathematics in terms of number, measurement and geometry, and data, and in science in terms of life science, physical science, and Earth science (Mullis et al., 2020). Students were assessed in the cognitive domains of knowing, applying, and reasoning (Mullis et al., 2020. For an overview of the first 20 years of TIMSS, see Mullis et al., 2016). Contextual data is also collected via questionnaires completed by students, teachers, principals (school questionnaire), parents/caregivers (home questionnaire/Early Learning Survey), and the TIMSS National Research Coordinator in each country (curriculum questionnaire) (Mullis et al., 2020; TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, 2020). PIRLS has taken place every five years since beginning in 2001. Hong Kong and Singapore have participated in all rounds to date, with Australia participating in 2011 and 2016 (Mullis et al., 2017). PIRLS 2016 focused on both literacy experience and acquiring and using information, i.e. comprehension (Mullis et al., 2017). Similar to TIMSS, context questionnaires are completed by students, teachers, principals (school questionnaire), parents/caregivers (home questionnaire/Learning to Read Survey), and the PIRLS National Research Coordinator in each country (curriculum questionnaire) (Mullis et al., 2017; TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, 2019). The TIMSS 2019 (Mullis et al., 2020) and PIRLS 2016 (Mullis et al., 2017) reports are similarly structured, with sections on average achievement scores, achievement scores in relation to international benchmarks, home environment support, school composition and resources, school climate, school discipline and safety, teacher 1

The IEA also conducted a number of earlier studies, including “First” and “Second” tests in Mathematics and Science, which are excluded from TIMSS reports. These were conducted with various age groups and countries, starting with Mathematics in the 1960s (see TIMSS & PIRLS International Study Center, n.d.).

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(and principal) preparation, curriculum and instruction/classroom instruction, and student attitudes (and engagement), along with challenges to teaching and learning and technology in instruction in TIMSS only. Despite the significant amount of contextual data produced beyond academic achievement, it is primarily the average academic achievement scores which are focused on by policy-makers, media, and researchers (Gorur & Wu, 2015; Klemenˇciˇc & Mirazchiyski, 2018). We also note here that parent questionnaire data is largely missing for Australia, and was not collected for TIMSS 2019.

3.3 TIMSS 2019 and PIRLS 2016 Average Achievement Scores In terms of academic performance in TIMSS 2019 and PIRLS 2016, students in Singapore and Hong Kong, on average, scored highly on the academic tests (see Table 3.1). The statistical significance of these average achievement scores is also worth noting. Singapore scored significantly higher than Australia in all three tests, and significantly higher than Hong Kong in TIMSS mathematics and science. Hong Kong scored significantly higher than Australia in TIMSS mathematics and PIRLS. There were no significant differences between Australia and Hong Kong in TIMSS science or Singapore and Hong Kong in PIRLS (Mullis et al., 2017, p. 23; 2020, pp. 10, 81). We acknowledge that these are the scores for only one round of each test, but considering the exploratory nature of this chapter, these are useful for setting up our discussions of scholarly habitus below. Table 3.1 Average achievement score and country ranking—TIMSS 2019 Year 4 and PIRLS 2016 Australia

Hong Kong

Singapore

Average Ranking Average Ranking Average Ranking achievement achievement achievement score score score TIMSS 516 (2.8) 2019—mathematics

27

602 (3.3)

2

625 (3.9)

1

TIMSS 2019—science

533 (2.4)

14

531 (3.3)

15

595 (3.4)

1

PIRLS 2016

544 (2.5)

21

569 (2.7)

3

576 (3.2)

2

Note 500 is the scale centrepoint. Standard errors as they appear in the reports are in brackets. TIMSS 2019 involved 58 countries at the Year 4 level and PIRLS 2016 involved 50 countries (Mullis et al., 2017, p. 20; 2020, pp. 9, 80)

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3.4 Scholarly Habitus, Context Data, and Children’s Lifeworlds Here, we consider the concept of scholarly habitus, focusing on the school-level data from the school questionnaire, as reported by principals, for TIMSS 2019 and PIRLS 2016. We have selected two exhibits for our discussion of scholarly habitus, as ways to provoke broader thinking and a wider consideration of the context of children’s lifeworlds: 1. Schools where students enter the primary grades with literacy and numeracy skills 2. School emphasis on academic success We consider these exhibits in the context of the TIMSS and PIRLS average achievement scores when these are broken down by exhibit and location (Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore), and consider some possible explanations for these through discussions of contextual factors such as early childhood education, and parent responses to education reform in the locations. In a sense then we take these TIMSS and PIRLS exhibits to spark a discussion of scholarly habitus, starting by unpacking some examples that may contribute to children’s dispositions to learning which impact on their academic engagement.

3.4.1 Children Entering School with Literacy and Numeracy Skills The school context questionnaires ask about literacy and numeracy skills children have when they enter school, as one aspect of school composition and resources. In this section, we draw on school questionnaire data which asked principals about the percentage of students at their school who started school with literacy and numeracy skills (TIMSS) and literacy skills (PIRLS). We suggest that entering school with literacy and numeracy skills is one aspect contributing to the formation of a scholarly habitus, and something that is about embodied practices, as much as it is about the skills themselves. We then situate this in a broader educational context, considering early childhood education in the locations as one potential influence on the formation of a scholarly habitus. In order to provide an estimated picture of the number of students starting school with literacy and numeracy skills, the school context questionnaires completed by principals asked 12 questions about literacy in TIMSS, and 6 of the same or similar questions about literacy in PIRLS (see Table 3.2) (Mullis et al., 2017, 2020). Principals were asked to respond to this on a four-point scale—more than 75% of the students in their school, 51–75%, 25–50%, and less than 25%. The exhibits presented in the TIMSS and PIRLS reports collate this data, where the 12 TIMSS questions are combined and presented on a three-point scale (more than 75%, 25–75%, and

3 Exploring the Scholarly Habitus in Children’s Lifeworlds … Table 3.2 Schools where students enter the primary grades with literacy skills—TIMSS 2019 and PIRLS 2016

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TIMSS 2019

PIRLS 2016

1. Recognise most of the letters of the alphabet

1. Recognise most of the letters of the alphabet

2. Read some words

2. Read some words

3. Read sentences

3. Read sentences

4. Write letters of the alphabet 4. Read a story 5. Write their names

5. Write letters of the alphabet

6. Write words other than their names

6. Write some words

7. Count up to 100 or higher 8. Recognise written numbers from 1–10 9. Recognise written numbers higher than 10 10. Write numbers from 1–10 11. Do simple addition 12. Do simple subtraction Note Principals were asked to respond to this on a four-point scale (more than 75% of the students in their school, 51–75%, 25–50%, and less than 25%). These were combined to make a three-point scale for the exhibits in the reports (more than 75%, 25–75%, and less than 25%) (Mullis et al., 2017, p. 183; 2020, p. 325)

less than 25%), and the 6 PIRLS questions are combined and also presented on the same three-point scale. The initial most striking aspect of the data relating to children being regarded as entering primary grades with literacy and numeracy skills is the differences between the three locations (Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong) in the number of schools where more than 75% of students enter school with these skills (see Tables 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5). The majority of schools in Singapore were reported by principals as having more than 75% of students who enter school with literacy and numeracy skills: 84% in TIMSS and 83% in PIRLS. This percentage is reported as being far lower in Australia, where very low percentages for more than 75% of students entering with these skills were indicated (9% in TIMSS and 6% in PIRLS). Out of the 57 countries with reported data in TIMSS, Singapore and Hong Kong rank second and fourth respectively (for schools indicating more than 75%), with Australia in 40th. Similarly for PIRLS, which includes 50 countries, Singapore was near the top (third) and Australia closer to the bottom (40th again), with Hong Kong in 11th. The percentages for Hong Kong are less extreme, but surprisingly vary greatly between the two tests, with 65% of schools reported as having over 75% of students entering with literacy and numeracy skills in TIMSS and 38% in PIRLS. At the other end of the scale, Singapore and Hong Kong had no schools where less than 25% of students

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Table 3.3 Schools where students enter the primary grades with literacy and numeracy skills— TIMSS 2019 Mathematics Year 4 Schools where more than 75% enter with skills

Schools where 25–75% enter with skills

Schools where less than 25% enter with skills

Percent Average Percent Average Percent of achievement of achievement of students students students

Average scale score

Average achievement

9 (2.1) 526 (9.3)

43 (3.4) 530 (4.8)

47 (3.3)

Hong Kong SAR

65 (4.4) 607 (4.0)

35 (4.3) 593 (6.2)

1 (0.8)

~~

12.2 (0.13)

Singapore

84 (0.0) 627 (4.5)

15 (0.0) 618 (9.0)

1 (0.0)

~~

12.7 (0.00)

International 24 (0.4) 508 (1.5) Average

56 (0.5) 499 (0.6)

20 (0.4)

Australia

498 (4.6)

8.9 (0.13)

480 (1.4)

Note Standard errors as they appear in the reports are in brackets. ~~ Indicates insufficient data (numbers too small to calculate achievement). TIMSS 2019 involved 58 countries at the Year 4 level, although only 57 had results for this question (Mullis et al., 2020, p. 326)

were regarded as starting school with the skills, compared to approximately half of schools in Australia (47% in TIMSS and 52% in PIRLS). Compared to the international averages in TIMSS (24%) and PIRLS (22%), Singapore and Hong Kong had a considerably higher percentage of schools where more than 75% of children were reported by principals as entering school with literacy and numeracy skills. In contrast, compared to the international average, Australia had a considerably lower percentage of schools with more than 75% of children starting school with these skills and a considerably higher percentage of schools where less than 25% enter school with these skills. It is also clear that the academic achievement scores vary depending on how many students are reported as entering school with literacy and numeracy skills. This shows diversity among students within locations and, we could argue, potentially differences in formation of a scholarly habitus. The average achievement scores on the TIMSS and PIRLS academic tests are higher in schools where more than 75% of students enter school with literacy and numeracy skills than they are for the average of all students within that location, although there are some exceptions (schools where 25– 75% of students enter with skills is slightly higher than schools where more than 75% enter with skills for Australia in TIMSS Mathematics and Hong Kong in PIRLS). Here we turn to a consideration of early childhood education in the locations to reflect on one of many possible explanations relating to scholarly habitus and the local context. To begin with, it is important to note that each location has a high percentage of children attending preschools: 81% of four-year-olds in Australia were enrolled in preschool programmes (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021), 90% of three- to

43 (3.4)

56 (0.5)

15 (0.0)

35 (4.3)

490 (0.7)

586 (8.1)

523 (5.8)

545 (4.3)

Average achievement

20 (0.4)

1 (0.0)

1 (0.8)

47 (3.3)

471 (1.6)

~~

~~

517 (4.0)

Percent of students Average achievement

Schools where less than 25% enter with skills

12.7 (0.00)

12.2 (0.13)

8.9 (0.13)

Average scale score

Note Standard errors as they appear in the reports are in brackets. ~~ Indicates insufficient data (numbers too small to calculate achievement). TIMSS 2019 involved 58 countries at the Year 4 level, although only 57 had results for this question (Mullis et al., 2020, pp. 326–327)

596 (4.0)

499 (1.6)

84 (0.0)

24 (0.4)

Singapore

International Average

548 (7.0)

536 (4.0)

9 (2.1)

65 (4.4)

Australia

Percent of students

Percent of students Average achievement

Hong Kong SAR

Schools where 25–75% enter with skills

Schools where more than 75% enter with skills

Table 3.4 Schools where students enter the primary grades with literacy and numeracy skills—TIMSS 2019 Science Year 4

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Table 3.5 Schools where students enter the primary grades with literacy skills—PIRLS 2016 Schools where more than 75% enter with skills

Schools where 25–75% enter with skills

Schools where less than 25% enter with skills

Percent Average Percent Average Percent of achievement of achievement of students students students Australia

Average scale score

Average achievement

6 (1.4) 569 (7.8)

42 (3.1) 550 (4.7)

52 (3.2)

536 (3.3)

9.2 (0.12)

Hong Kong SAR

38 (4.0) 567 (4.3)

50 (4.9) 575 (3.2)

12 (3.7)

556 (13.1)

11.9 (0.20)

Singapore

83 (0.0) 580 (3.5)

15 (0.0) 553 (9.5)

2 (0.0)

~~

13.8 (0.00)

International 22 (0.4) 516 (1.6) Average

47 (0.5) 512 (0.8)

31 (0.4)

491 (1.0)

Note 500 is the scale centrepoint. ~~ Indicates insufficient data (numbers too small to calculate achievement). Standard errors as they appear in the reports are in brackets. PIRLS 2016 involved 50 countries (Mullis et al., 2017, p. 182)

six-year-old children in Hong Kong attended preschool (Education Encyclopedia, 2021) and 90% of five- to six-year-old children in Singapore were enrolled in halfday or full-day preschools (Ministry of Social and Family and Development, 2016). However, the curriculum and pedagogies of preschool provision in the three locations, of course, have unique features of kindergartens or preschools inherent to each system (e.g. Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority, 2020; Education Bureau, 2018; Ministry of Education [MOE], 2021a). In terms of our discussion of the scholarly habitus as those dispositions learnt through everyday sociocultural practices that form the basis of academic engagement, it would seem that the structures and features of preschool/kindergarten in Hong Kong and Singapore provide more structured early literacy and numeracy opportunities to engage with and learn the formal skills associated with traditional print literacy and numeracy, as well as an array of embodied practices relating to learning. Lee and Yelland (2017) draw on the idea of the “miniature student” to describe these practices in Hong Kong: [y]oung children, as miniature students in (pre)schools, are subject to strict sociocultural governance involving compliance in terms of a uniform dress code, experiencing learning in designated time slots, practicing the “basics” and having their bodies/minds regulated and confined to specific places and actions. (p. 54)

Academic performance is one important aspect of this educational climate. As Lee (2014) notes, “the cultural expectation and pressure to perform academically is common for most Hong Kong students” (p. 106). Furthermore, Lee and Yelland (2017) emphasise the ways in which the “miniature student” has become embedded in East Asia:

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contemporary East Asian childhood has been subsumed into being and becoming a “miniature student” who performs well academically from the beginning of the schooling process in a curriculum context that is highly academic in content. A central critique here might pertain to the question of how the contemporary phenomenon of “miniature student” has become a taken-for-granted sociocultural and educational construction of the child in East Asian contexts as a new and dangerous grand narrative for all children. (p. 43)

This is despite curriculum and policy reforms in Hong Kong since 2000 where the pre-primary curriculum guidelines advocate for a more holistic approach to child development that embraces: Child-centred learning (curriculum), Play for learning, and The Project approach to learning (Curriculum Development Council [CDC], 2017). Yet, despite these aspirations, Yelland and Leung (2018) document “a day in the life” of a kindergarten class that continues to be characterised by formal learning scenarios in which print literacy and numeracy were introduced and practised in formal worksheets. To ensure that preschools continue to adapt to the recent teaching and learning strategies, the Ministry of Education in Singapore developed a kindergarten curriculum framework to support and guide early childhood professionals to meet the individual needs of children (MOE, 2010). Outlined within the curriculum framework, there is a strong emphasis on children having a “desire to learn, explore and be prepared to think out of the box”, “thinking critically, assess options and make sound decisions”, and “work[ing] with people from diverse cultural backgrounds, with different ideas and perspectives” (MOE, 2010, p. 17). In contrast, the Australian play-based curriculum in the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) Belonging, being and becoming has opportunities for emergent literacy and numeracy experiences which are part of everyday lives and ordinary moments (Department of Education and Training [DET], 2019, see also the National Quality Standard: ACECQA, 2018). Preschools in Australia have a stronger focus on play-based learning, where children are encouraged to develop their foundational skills through their explorations of play (DET, 2019). While the definition of play has a range of different characteristics and definitions, the consensus is that play must be fun, self-directed, and intrinsically motivated (Fleer, 2017). The EYLF highlights the importance of play and how it supports children’s development (DET, 2019), however, there have been critical debates surrounding the importance of unstructured play and its impact on academic outcomes (e.g. Harman & Harms, 2017; Roskos et al., 2010). While the EYLF highlights the significance of intentional teaching within teachers’ practices, this is considerably different to how Hong Kong and Singapore preschools teach. Within Australia intentional teaching is not didactic, as it does not have specific content that needs to be taught. Instead, intentional teaching is considered “modelling and demonstrating, open questioning, speculating, explaining, engaging in shared thinking and problem solving to extend children’s thinking and learning” (DET, 2019, p.18). Moreover, the EYLF explicitly states that intentional teaching is the exact opposite to rote learning (DET, 2019). Since 2003 in Singapore and 2001 in Hong Kong, both locations have attempted to shift away from an embedded curriculum context that has a strong focus on preparing children for primary school through formality and routine. The reforms in both

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locations aimed to have a stronger play curriculum while also improving teaching and learning for educators. However, early childhood staff still feel pressure and are governed by the expectations of parents, who are worried that without a strong focus on literacy and numeracy skills, their children will not exceed academically later in life (Ng, 2011; Pearson & Rao, 2006). Considering early childhood education as one reflection on the formation of scholarly habitus across the different locations then, it appears that children in Hong Kong and Singapore are building towards academic learning outcomes in a more focused way compared to children in Australia. This occurs not only via the learning of specific skills, but also in embodied sociocultural practices relating to learning prior to the starting of compulsory education in primary school years.

3.4.2 School Emphasis on Academic Success We turn now to focus more explicitly on academic “success”. Frequently, of course, ideas about “success” are manifested in the content and structure of the high-stakes tests and their results that are so pervasive in contemporary educational discourse. As one aspect of school climate, the TIMSS and PIRLS school context questionnaires ask principals about their school’s emphasis on academic success. Again, we suggest that the emphasis a school has on academic success will play a major role in shaping how they enact mandated curriculum and the practices they support, and may be one of many contributors to building children’s scholarly habitus. After outlining these exhibits in the TIMSS and PIRLS reports, we shift to consider parent responses to education reform in the locations as one of the many possible contributors to scholarly habitus when thinking about school emphasis on academic success. Within the school context questionnaire of TIMSS and PIRLS, principals are asked to respond to items on a scale deemed to relate to school emphasis on academic success (see Table 3.6) (Mullis et al., 2017;,on a three-point scale of very high, high, and medium (which includes responses of medium, low, and very low). Considering the generally significantly higher average achievement scores in Singapore and Hong Kong compared to Australia, the findings regarding school emphasis on “academic success” was unexpected. Overall, few principals reported that their school had a very high emphasis on academic success. In TIMSS 2019, this was 9% in both Singapore (19th of 57 countries) and Australia (20th), which was higher than the international average of 7% and Hong Kong of 5% (28th) (see Tables 3.7 and 3.8). In PIRLS 2016, the very high emphasis percentages were 14% in Australia (10th of 50 countries) and 12% in Singapore (13th), again higher than the international average of 8%, and much higher than the 2% in Hong Kong (39th) (see Table 3.9). These findings again highlight the complexities associated with any readings and interpretations of the TIMSS and PIRLS data. When focusing on the average achievement scores, the findings are more as expected, with students scoring higher average achievement scores in schools where principals reported having a very high emphasis on success. This relationship was

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Table 3.6 School emphasis on academic success—TIMSS 2019 and PIRLS 2016 TIMSS 2019

PIRLS 2016

1. Teachers’ understanding of the school’s curricular goals

1. Teachers’ understanding of the school’s curricular goals

2. Teachers’ degree of success in implementing the school’s curriculum

2. Teachers’ degree of success in implementing the school’s curriculum

3. Teachers’ expectations for student achievement

3. Teachers’ expectations for student achievement

4. Teachers’ ability to inspire students

4. Teachers’ ability to inspire students

5. Parental involvement in school activities

5. Collaboration between school leadership (including master teachers) and teachers to plan instruction

6. Parental commitment to ensure that students 6. Parental involvement in school activities are ready to learn 7. Parental expectations for student achievement

7. Parental commitment to ensure that students are ready to learn

8. Parental support for student achievement

8. Parental expectations for student achievement

9. Students’ desire to do well in school

9. Parental support for student achievement

10. Students’ ability to reach school’s academic goals

10. Students’ desire to do well in school

11. Students’ respect for classmates who excel 11. Students’ ability to reach school’s academically academic goals 12. Students’ respect for classmates who excel academically Note Principals were asked to respond to each of these items on a five-point scale from very high to very low. These were combined to make a three-point scale for the exhibits (very high, high, and medium) (Mullis et al., 2017, p. 202; 2020, p. 343)

demonstrated across all areas of the scale. This pattern was evident in the data from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Australia, as well as more broadly across the international average. As discussed, the principals’ responses indicate that only a few schools were reported as having a “very high” emphasis on academic success, and this seems surprising, especially considering the consistently high TIMSS and PIRLS achievement scores gained by many students in Singapore and Hong Kong. Certainly, policy documents in both Singapore (MOE, 2013) and Hong Kong (CDC, 2014) have attempted to move to a broader conceptualisation of educational “success” by de-emphasising the importance of test results and the regimes that are needed to support performance in tests, and placing more of an emphasis on problem solving and creativity. Teach Less, Learn More (TLLM) was launched in 2005 in Singapore, with the intention of improving the quality of teaching that was undertaken within the classroom. The aim of this educational reform was to make learning more enjoyable and

556 (8.6)

9 (1.9)

5 (2.4)

9 (0.0)

7 (0.3)

Australia

Hong Kong SAR

Singapore

International Average 55 (0.5)

70 (0.0)

51 (4.5) 508 (0.7)

628 (4.5)

607 (4.3)

521 (4.1)

Average achievement

37 (0.5)

21 (0.0)

44 (3.9)

38 (3.4)

Percent of students

Medium emphasis

486 (0.8)

607 (7.6)

592 (5.5)

496 (5.4)

Average achievement

10.6 (0.00)

9.8 (0.19)

10.2 (0.17)

Average scale score

Note Standard errors as they appear in the reports are in brackets. TIMSS 2019 involved 58 countries at the Year 4 level (Mullis et al., 2020, p. 344)

515 (2.1)

648 (12.8)

628 (21.1)

Percent of students

Average achievement

Percent of students 53 (3.2)

High emphasis

Very high emphasis

Table 3.7 School emphasis on academic success—TIMSS 2019 Mathematics Year 4

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568 (7.8)

9 (1.9)

5 (2.4)

9 (0.0)

7 (0.3)

Australia

Hong Kong SAR

Singapore

International Average 55 (0.5)

70 (0.0)

51 (4.5) 499 (0.7)

598 (4.0)

539 (4.4)

537 (3.7)

Average achievement

37 (0.5)

21 (0.0)

44 (3.9)

38 (3.4)

Percent of students

Medium emphasis

474 (0.9)

575 (6.8)

519 (5.7)

516 (4.5)

Average achievement

10.6 (0.00)

9.8 (0.19)

10.2 (0.17)

Average scale score

Note Standard errors as they appear in the reports are in brackets. TIMSS 2019 involved 58 countries at the Year 4 level (Mullis et al., 2020, p. 345)

508 (2.4)

617 (11.4)

567 (27.8)

Percent of students

Average achievement

Percent of students 53 (3.2)

High emphasis

Very high emphasis

Table 3.8 School emphasis on academic success—TIMSS 2019 Science Year 4

3 Exploring the Scholarly Habitus in Children’s Lifeworlds … 53

8 (0.3)

International Average

~ ~

531 (1.9)

615 (8.8) 54 (0.5)

59 (0.0)

56 (4.0) 518 (0.6)

576 (3.7)

571 (3.7)

556 (3.8)

Average achievement

38 (0.5)

30 (0.0)

42 (3.9)

36 (2.9)

Percent of students

Medium emphasis

494 (0.8)

560 (6.7)

566 (4.7)

519 (4.4)

Average achievement

10.4 (0.00)

9.6 (0.11)

10.4 (0.15)

Average scale score

Note 500 is the scale centrepoint. Standard errors as they appear in the reports are in brackets. PIRLS 2016 involved 50 countries (Mullis et al., 2017, p. 201)

2 (1.2)

12 (0.0)

Singapore

567 (6.0)

14 (2.3)

Australia

Hong Kong SAR

Percent of students

Average achievement

Percent of students 49 (3.8)

High emphasis

Very high emphasis

Table 3.9 School emphasis on academic success—PIRLS 2016

54 E. Waghorn et al.

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engaging for students so that they could reach their potential (MOE, 2013; Retna & Ng, 2016). For this to be implemented, teachers were required to reflect on their teaching practices, and were encouraged to innovate and improve their pedagogy and classroom practices (MOE, 2013). According to official reports, since implementing TLLM, students have shown an increased school enjoyment, more willingness to participate and more cognitive engagement (MOE, 2013). To meet the evolving challenge within the Twenty-first Century, Hong Kong developed the Basic Education Curriculum Guide in 2002, with the curriculum reform implemented in schools the same year. The purpose of the reform was for all students to “learn how to learn” (CDC, 2014, p. 2), which will support students through a range of skills and become lifelong learners. Through the reform, a range of further enhancement or improvements were considered. This included, “supporting and balancing children’s physical and mental development, learning, teaching and assessment that meet the learning needs of the students, and catering for learner diversity” (CDC, 2014, pp. 8–9). This shift in educational emphasis through reform policies could have effects on the scholarly habitus as it diminishes the value placed on tests and reduces the importance of those dispositions to learning that might be regarded as the sole indicators of “success” in school. But, as some research illustrates (e.g. Ho, 2015; Yelland & Leung, 2018), the practices of kindergarten and the first years of primary school in Hong Kong, for example, are very much textbook-based and content-driven, and occur in classrooms with didactic pedagogies. Further, there are significant tests at the end of primary school in both Hong Kong and Singapore, which is essentially the major determining factor for tracking and streaming in relation to which secondary school students can attend. While the Ministry of Education in Singapore has changed the format and calculations associated with the Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE) (MOE, 2021b), they have not removed it despite over two decades of reform (Tan, 2019). Tan (2019) further highlights that despite the push for educational reform in both Singapore and Hong Kong, parents continue to place a high importance on academic “success”. Zhao et al. (2019) further support this notion, by arguing that parents are caught up in a worldview where “success” is measured through their children’s performance on high-stakes tests. Interestingly, Tan (2019) discusses that some parents have turned the policy reform to their advantage by raising test scores of their children, improving their chances of being accepted into the elite schools. This is done through making use of their economic capital, by paying for private tutoring and enrichment classes. Jones (2019) found similar findings within her research into teachers’, parents’, and children’s views in Singapore. It was demonstrated that parents felt any investment in tutoring classes was worthwhile as it would potentially support their child’s academic outcomes. Some parents even commented that they felt school did not prepare their children enough for examinations, and that it was their role as parents to make sure their children were well prepared. One of the significant findings was that parents felt an obligation to invest in their children’s schooling due to the school not catering enough for their child’s individual needs. Going further, Choi (2016) draws attention to the fact Hong Kong parents raise concerns about their

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children participating in play, particularly free play, as they feel that it will divert children’s attention from their academic work.

3.5 Conclusions In this chapter we have extended our consideration of children’s lifeworlds to what Watkins (2005, 2018) and Watkins and Noble (2013) have called the scholarly habitus, that is, the dispositions to learning that contribute to academic engagement. We have engaged with the TIMSS and PIRLS data in new ways to spark broader discussions of children’s scholarly habitus as a way to consider their everyday practices and learning experiences in local contexts. Here, we have used the concept of the scholarly habitus to unpack some of the PIRLS and TIMSS context data, drawing on the exhibits focused on the ways in which principals regard children as entering school with skills in literacy and numeracy, and their school’s emphasis on academic success. We considered the work of Gorur and Wu (2015), recognising that highstakes tests cannot be viewed in isolation, without considering external influences on children’s scholarly habitus. We have used the scholarly habitus to guide our reflections on some of the many possible contributors to the reported findings in the TIMSS and PIRLS reports. In particular, we have made connections to the local contexts by reflecting on early childhood education and parent responses to education reform in the locations. A closer look at the PIRLS and TIMSS data in relation to specific exhibits has also allowed us to consider diversity between and within locations, beyond a focus on average academic achievement scores. Additional unpacking of local contexts would also be useful to further consider diversity within locations in terms of, for example, children’s leisure activities and the ways these may impact on a scholarly habitus (e.g. Choi, 2016). It is clear that a range of factors within children’s lifeworlds can impact on children’s scholarly habitus. How children approach or “succeed” within high-stakes tests and their schooling is often discussed in detail, however as highlighted within this chapter, there needs to be further consideration to how children’s lifeworlds and their habitus play an influential role in academic engagement.

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Chapter 4

Picturing Policy: Visual Representations of Curriculum Policy in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore Jennifer Crome and Sue Saltmarsh

Abstract This chapter considers the articulation of education discourse through visual representations of curriculum policies in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore under the umbrella of the Global Childhoods project. We are concerned with the ways that policy and culture are co-implicated in the everyday lives of children in global cities. We explore how, in contexts of high-stakes testing, rankings and intense competition, discourses of education are depicted in officially produced visual texts. Texts selected for analysis here focus on curriculum content, learning, and the imagined skills and characteristics of idealised learner-citizens. Drawing insights from social semiotics and using Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality, we show how these visual policy texts represent education in broadly instrumentalist terms concerned with “what” and “who” is being taught in a nation’s schools. In all three study sites, these concerns connect to broader economic and social goals, and tacitly reiterate ideologically inflected narratives concerned with the purposes and potential of education. We highlight distinctions between visual policy texts that acknowledge education as an interconnected human endeavour, and those that rely on imagery and bounded lists. We also argue that such images and lists are largely devoid of reference to the students, teachers and societies. Keywords Visual policy analysis · Curriculum policy · Australian curriculum · Teach Less Learn More · Learning to Learn Education policies around the world are increasingly available in a range of modalities and make use of options for dynamic and visually appealing presentation of information and ideas. Some scholars have observed that contemporary education policy often includes visual graphics and images designed to capture attention, persuade J. Crome (B) The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Saltmarsh The Education University of Hong Kong, Ting Kok, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I-F. Lee et al. (eds.), Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities, Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0_4

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intended audiences and illuminate envisioned futures (Koh, 2009, 2013). Indeed, the continuing expansion of new technologies for the creation, editing, storage and transmission of images and other forms of visual data has been influential in the growth of qualitative visual research methods across a wide range of fields in the social sciences, including education and policy studies (Knoblauch et al., 2008; Rose, 2016). This has required a paradigm shift in how policy is seen. While the critical analysis of education policy has traditionally focused on official policy documents, statements about education policy on government websites and in official policy statements and speeches, attention to the visualisation of education policy continues to develop (Koh, 2013). In this chapter, we consider how national education policy reforms in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong make use of “images and accompanying text [that] interact to form more robust narratives” (Boscarino, 2020, p. 278) about curriculum, learning and learners from the distinctly ideological vantage point of governments. We understand policy texts, whether circulated in print or in online multimodal forms, as having an important function in the production of educational discourse, practice and policy cultures (Saltmarsh, 2015; Stein, 2004; Wilkins, 2020). Concurring with recent Foucauldian scholarship, we contend that “policy texts can be viewed as dynamic, productive spaces that attempt to constitute rather than simply reflect reality” (Wilkins, 2020, p. 144). Hence, our comparison of visual graphics used to explain curriculum policies in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore explores how the interplay of visual design and semiotic meanings function to construct curriculum content and learning processes in ways that reflect not just stated policy goals, but also work to position and construct their idealised policy subjects. Essentially, visual design is embedded within cultural systems of reasoning, in which semiotic meanings are mobilised through policies to produce the desirability of change. We explore how visual policy texts, that is policy texts in which meaning is shaped and communicated by images and/or words, guide readers to what Aaron Koh refers to as a “preferred reading path” (2009, p. 284, original emphasis). Preferred reading paths construct, reiterate and privilege policy ideologies and agendas over alternate or divergent readings and invite “preferred” ways of envisaging and enacting policy goals and reform agendas.

4.1 National Policy Texts: Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong Education policies in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong share a number of similarities, reflecting in part the ways that global flows of people, capital, technology, images and ideas (Appadurai, 1990, 1996) have shaped policyscapes (Appadurai, 1990) and contributed to the expansion of cross-national education policy borrowing (Halpin & Troyna, 1995) in the decades since post-Cold War globalisation. Shared similarities in education policies also reflect familiar tropes of neoliberalism as the

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dominant political rationality globally (Connell, 2013; Lingard, 2021; Savage, 2017), and the imperatives brought to bear on national identities, economies and political systems in response to globalisation. As Bob Lingard and Sam Sellar (2013) point out: education has become a central element of economic policy for most nations. This has led to an emphasis in education policy on human capital production across all sectors, with the quality and quantity of human capital seen as central for the global competitiveness of the national economy. (p. 20)

We see these emphases on economic and educational competitiveness at work in the curriculum and broader education policies across all three of our study sites. While each has local and regional differences and histories, their similarities as former British colonies in the Asia–Pacific region, and English as the main language of instruction in Australia and Singapore, and a key learning area in Hong Kong, enable meaningful comparisons (Quek et al., 2008). Education policy in all three places, for example, constructs the objective of meeting the needs of today’s students through a focus on what are seen as twenty-first-century skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, innovation and adaptability (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2018). At the national level in each location, education has been promoted as instrumental in boosting economic growth, that is, as an investment in human capital for economic ends (Becker, 1975; Schultz, 1960). In Australia, this is outlined in the Alice Springs (Mpartnwe) Declaration, which underpins the Australian Curriculum (AC), through the goal of “promoting excellence and equity” and recognition that “all young Australians should have the opportunity to become confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners, and active and informed members of the community” (Education Council, 2019, pp. 5–6). In Hong Kong, similar goals are expressed in terms of comprehensive education and lifelong learning with a commitment to “fostering the moral, intellectual, physical, social and aesthetic development of students” and “cultivating their adaptive, creative and lifelong learning capabilities as well as independent, multiperspective and critical thinking skills” (Education Bureau, 2013, p. 1). Similarly, in Singapore, based on the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) “Framework for 21st Century Competencies and Student Outcomes”, education seeks to ensure that each individual develops “a good sense of self-awareness, a sound moral compass, and the necessary skills and knowledge to take on the challenges of the future…as confident persons, self-directed learners, active contributors and concerned citizens” (MOE, 2022). Both Hong Kong and Singapore position their approach to the acquisition of twenty-first-century skills with distinctly Asian values, described by Cheng (2011, 2017) as focused on a sense of community, productivity and efficiency. This is also taken up as a point of discussion in Chapter 1 of this volume.

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4.2 Policy Discourse and Neoliberal Governance The relatively ubiquitous global concerns discussed above maintain a focus in the three locations on what is taught, how it is taught and the formation of particular types of subjectivities for those who are taught. As such, “education policies and the practices of education reform are acts of governmentality and must be understood as a tactical response to globalisation” (Koh, 2004, p. 345). In Australia, for example, education policies since the early 2000s have reflected a rise of “social capitalist” political imagination, with “equity framed primarily as a market enhancing mechanism” that is “collapsed into a human capital agenda which recognises intrinsic links between the social and economic domains of governance” (Savage, 2013, p. 186). Scholars have continued to point out that under these market-driven agendas, education policy has been tethered to the evolving global knowledge economy as a site for increased economic returns (Reid, 2019; Savage, 2017). The $AUD16.2B “Building the Education Revolution” initiative introduced by the Australian federal government in 2007 (Gillard, 2008; Rudd & Smith, 2007) further consolidated the links between education and global capitalism, claiming simultaneously to signal a new era of equity while also building enterprising, marketised and globally competitive schools (Savage, 2021). Schools thus configured operate as sites of governmentality, charged with enacting policy agendas via the subjectivities of idealised learner/citizens, with curriculum a key mechanism for operationalising this form of biopolitical governance (Foucault, 2008). The Australian Curriculum, elements of which began being introduced in 2014, reiterates its subjectivating function, being “designed to develop successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens” (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA, n.d.b). The curriculum is intended as a “progression of learning that makes clear to teachers, parents, students and others in the wider community what is to be taught, and the quality of learning expected of young people as they progress through school” which includes general capabilities and targeted cross-curriculum priorities (ACARA, n.d.a). The three-dimensional structure of the curriculum has been described as “structured and agile” to prepare students for a complex and uncertain future (Zilm, 2019). Similarly, neoliberalism and marketisation continue to shape education policy development in Hong Kong with the Learning to Learn (LTL) curriculum reform (EDB, 2001) reinforcing citizen/learner self-regulation through the promotion of “lifelong learning” capabilities and “whole-person development” (Curriculum Development Council [CDC], 2015, p. 1). Here, the aim of policymakers developing the LTL curriculum was to keep abreast of international trends, enable a local and global outlook for students and cultivate self-directed and innovative attitudes designed to meet the challenges of a knowledge-based society (EDB, 2018). Bound up with larger neoliberal market forces, new funding policies initiated as part of the LTL initiative included the competitive Quality Education Fund of HK$5

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billion linked to school-based quality improvement projects to “encourage innovation, competition and self-motivated reform in primary and secondary schools” (Tung, 1997, p. 39). Additionally, the Education Bureau (EDB), responsible for implementing education policies, expanded their operations to allow full bureaucratic capacity in monitoring the objectives and performance targets of policy initiatives, measures and programmes (Chang & McLaren, 2018; Lee et al., 2019). Schools and teachers became accountable, and students were constructed as governable (Rose, 1999a). Most recently, the reintroduction of a national security education curriculum and changes to the Liberal studies subject with an increased emphasis on Hong Kong’s connection to mainland China and the rule of law conferred “obligations and duties” on the student citizen (Rose, 2006, p. 158). Shifting towards a more holistic education, the LTL merges neoliberalism and Chinese nationalism by positioning the learner/citizen as productive in the service of the economy and loyal to the nationalist interests of mainland China (Chee, 2012; Choi, 2005). Singapore’s education framework is organised around four interrelated components consisting of separate visions intended to transform education in order to prepare the nation for twenty-first-century challenges. The four components or visions include: “(1) a vision for the whole nation, (2) a vision for Singaporean education, (3) a vision for implementing school change, and (4) a vision for the collaborative constructs—the professional learning communities—that are necessary to anchor the change in each school” (Fogarty & Pete, 2010, p. 97). The second component, Teach Less, Learn More (TLLM), launched in 2005, responded to globalisation by focusing on the formation of idealised learners who become competent citizens (Deng et al., 2013), and on enriching student learning, improving teacher quality and introducing a flexible and innovative educational approach to build competence. Following on from the earlier Thinking Schools Learning Nation (TSLN) vision, TLLM became a “social investment in preparing ‘human resources’ (i.e. students) to participate in a global, competitive economy” (Koh, 2002, p. 255). In 2014, the MOE added a framework for twenty-first-century competencies and student outcomes ushering in a more holistic approach to equip students with lifeready competencies—skills regarded as vital for Singapore’s economic future as multinational investment in innovation hubs, Research and Development centres (R&D) and start-ups surge (Ong, 2018). As a tactical mobilisation of Singapore’s population (Koh, 2010), the focus on creativity, critical thinking and encouragement of independent lifelong learner identities subjectify the learner/citizen as individually successful and socially mobile through the “logic of economic competition” (Yao, 2007, p. 168). Through the neoliberal privileging of self-reliance, learners are encouraged to pursue individual financial security and wealth accumulation, schools are promoted as “competing for students, marks and money” and “parents as consumers exercise choice” (Connell, 2013, p. 103). In each of these examples, we see points of similarity and connection, as well as local and national specificities that lend distinctiveness to education policy reforms in each of the three sites. We argue here, through an analysis of visual policy texts, that education is represented in broadly instrumentalist terms concerned with “what”

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and “who” is being taught in each nation’s schools, and that in each of the countries considered, these concerns connect to broader economic and social goals. In the following sections, we offer a discussion of our theoretical and methodological approach to analysing the features and constitutive functions of images and visual design in policy texts. We then offer an analysis of three examples, one each from Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, considering each as they are situated within the complex and contested space of contemporary education policy reforms globally.

4.3 Method Contemporary policy and policy-related texts can be found in a variety of forms and modalities, and their contribution to policy discourse merits critical attention. This chapter relies on Foucault’s (1981) notion of discourse and discursive formations to unpack the discourses evident in the visual representations of curriculum in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore. Foucault (1981) suggests that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed…to gain mastery over its chance events” (p. 52). In other words, discourse fixes meaning to achieve desired ends and, as Foucault (1981) elaborates, ensures the reproduction of the social system, and desired goals, through forms of selection and omission. Specifically, discourses are produced and inhibited through processes of formation and constraint, production and exclusion. Our analysis of these visual curriculum texts shows how specific discourses construct preferred ways of schooling subjectivities in each country, resonating with Foucault’s (1972) contention that discourses are “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (p. 49). We also employ Koh’s (2009) insights about the connections between policy texts and the ideological work that discourses do to represent education imagination and to produce particular kinds of subjectivities. Drawing on Foucault, scholars such as Dean (2010), Rabinow and Rose (2006) and Rose (1999a, 1999b, 2006) suggest that governments are increasingly casting their citizens as “subjects of responsibility, autonomy and choice” (Rose, 2006, p. 155). Here, Foucault’s notion of governmentality is applicable as rationalities and technologies of visual education policy documents increasingly mediate the process of policy formation and dissemination to manipulate and guide the conduct of people. Visual policy production directs student performance towards desired goals. Dean (2010) explains that knowledge-based societies have increasingly employed governmentality that focuses on “self-managing individuals and communities, enterprising persons and active citizens” whose productivity will enrich the nation (p. 200). It is in education institutions, and particularly through education policymaking and policy texts, that much of this construction of subjects takes place. Miller and Rose (2008) highlight a neoliberal political rationality that steers populations towards the subject position of productive economic citizens who govern themselves in the pursuit of ambition and personal aspiration to acquire prized education credentials.

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The exercise of power here involves governing of the self in the pursuit of individual freedoms and happiness to bring about deserved rewards.

4.4 Reading Images and Visual Design Whether circulated in print or in the form of online multimodal texts, there is increasing reliance on visual design and the use of photographs, images and infographics that articulate government agendas within the “visual scape of education policy documents” (Koh, 2009, p. 294). Visual images and design, like other features of policy texts, are therefore rich sites for exploring the interplay of policy assumptions, rationales and ideals, as well as the ways in which they discursively construct the subjects of education policy—learners, teachers, leaders and societies. As Koh (2009) points out, visual design in policy documents and other visually mediated texts has a distinctly ideological function and is “instrumental in setting up preferred reading pathways and meanings of schooling and schooling identities” (pp. 286–287). As a codified practice, visual design focuses on particular aspects of social reality and shapes preferred ways of reading (Koh, 2013). Preferred ways of reading are achieved through social semiotics which engage both “rhetoric” and “design”. “Rhetoric emphasises the social relations obtained in the process of communication” and “design highlights the arrangement of the available semiotic resources” (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2020, p. 219). Kress and van Leeuwen (2020) describe preferred ways of reading as “reading paths” that “take the readers by the hand, guiding them firmly through the text” and providing them with “hints and suggestions” (pp. 213–214). Because the design process is not neutral, the important questions to ask in our visual text-saturated landscape are: “who we see and who is omitted; who is privileged within our scopic regime and who is disadvantaged; and whose interests the visual representations serve?” (Koh, 2013, p. 118). Employing what Kress and Van Leeuwen (2020) describe as the grammar of visual design, officially produced visual policy texts draw on semiotic resources such as colour, perspective, framing and composition to emphasise key elements and shape perspectives. As such, colour, perspective, framing and composition will be examined to identify how these elements are used in curriculum policy texts to privilege desired outcomes. In visual communication, the choice between different colours or different compositional structures carries particular meanings, affects emotions, communicates precise information, alters attitudes and behavioural intentions as well as motivates behaviour itself (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2020). In addition, the use of text to overlay an image authoritatively imposes meaning on the image (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2020). Here, we intend to employ the visual grammar of social semiotics to examine the ways in which official images and policy texts are seen as resources for encoding forms of social (inter)action that are influenced by dominant discourses and acts of governmentality. We now turn to an analysis of images from each of the three curriculum documents: The Australian Curriculum in Australia; Learning to Learn Version 2 in Hong

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Kong; and Teach Less, Learn More in Singapore. We explore how these images, in dialogue with stated policy goals, function to reinscribe policy reform agendas while simultaneously constructing idealised subjects of education policy.

4.5 Picturing Policies: Policy Images from Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore The Foundation—Year 10 Australian Curriculum (AC) (see Fig. 4.1) is described as a three-dimensional curriculum and is illustrated as a cube (ACARA, n.d.b). This visual is found in official documentation about the curriculum (see ACARA, 2018) and on the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) website. ACARA, the independent statutory body that developed Australia’s national curriculum, outlines the purpose of the curriculum as: “designed to develop successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens” who “actively participate in society and the economy as individuals and more broadly as global citizens” (ACARA, n.d.a). The AC “empowers students to shape their social and economic futures and to contribute to the development of prosperous, sustainable and equitable Australian and global economies” (ACARA, n.d.a). The curriculum framework defines the expectations for all young Australians—what they should be taught, know and be capable of doing. The three dimensions of the framework together outline the content, achievement standards and progressions of learning (ACARA, 2012). The AC, “distinctive in its multi-dimensional design” (ACARA, 2018, p. 38), presents eight learning areas on the one side of the cube with seven general capabilities on the other side and finally three cross-curriculum priorities on the final visible side. The rigid structure of the cube constructs the AC as firmly fixed and ordered within stable, defined relationships. These are presented as lists of knowledge, priorities and capabilities—inferring that education is something that is “done” to students. Kress and Van Leeuwen (2020) assert that abstract shapes such as squares “derive the properties of the shape” (p. 54). As a signifier, the shape of the square carries meaning potential and the square “can connote… a source of oppression which literally and figurately ‘boxes us in’” (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2020, p. 53). In the same way, the AC could be considered as boxed in, with students straightjacketed according to the prescribed categories of knowledge listed and decided as significant by the creators of the curriculum. The emphasis on “traditional subjects”, shown as learning areas, frames the kinds of knowledge that matter and privileges “instrumental thinking” (Yates, 2018, p. 139). Here, the kinds of knowledge privileged in the national curriculum dominate, shape and determine what is thought, spoken and done to render “assumptions and values invisible, turn subjective perspectives and understandings into apparently objective truths, and determine that some things are self-evident and realistic while others are dubious and impractical” (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005, p. 17). In short, “regimes of truth” (Foucault, 1977) constructed through

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Fig. 4.1 Australian Curriculum note. Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), 2018, p. 39

the visual discourse provides the mechanism for rendering reality agreeable to certain actions (Miller & Rose, 2008). Additionally, the AC is analogous to a Rubik’s cube, a 3D combination puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian professor of architecture Ern˝o Rubik that contains an internal pivot mechanism allowing each face to turn independently to create a multitude of possible combinations and permutations (see Reese, 2020). Like Rubik’s cube, the AC and its associated dimensions/elements are movable and intended to be manipulated and “used flexibly by schools according to jurisdiction and system” (ACARA, n.d.b). The multiplicity of options and combinations makes the AC confusing and unmanageable and suggests an overcrowded curriculum that relies on components arbitrarily connected by virtue of their inclusion in the various lists that comprise the cube (Donnelly & Wiltshire, 2014). Ironically, in trying to be all things to all people, the increased flexibly has added complexity and created a curriculum that is “monolithic, inflexible and unwieldy” (Donnelly & Wiltshire, 2014, p. 2). Responding to the “matrix” design of the curriculum, Gilbert (2018) maintains that general capabilities within learning areas are just “add-ons and of secondary importance” (p. 171). This is reinforced through instructions to embed general capabilities “only in…subjects and areas of learning where relevant” (Donnelly & Wiltshire, 2014, p. 132). Moreover, the salience of the hierarchical structure of the AC sees literacy and numeracy positioned at the top of the “General Capability” face of the cube while intercultural and ethical understanding takes the bottom position, mirroring the reality where Intercultural Understanding and the Personal and Social capability are “barely referenced in many of the subjects” (McCandless et al., 2020, p. 574). Kress and van Leeuwen (2020) describe this as a “vertical reading

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path” that signifies a “sense of hierarchy” (p. 215). Similarly, an analysis of the cross-curricular priorities by Peacock et al. (2015) concluded that the priorities were constructed on discourses of “Australia’s materialistic future in Asia”, addressing neoliberal and instrumentalist goals concomitantly suppressing sustainability and indigenous priorities (p. 384). Finally, according to the developers of the AC, the “primary audience for the Australian Curriculum is teachers” (ACARA, n.d.a). Absent is a “conceptualisation of learners and their life worlds” and “the enterprise of learning itself” (Scarino, 2019, p. 59). This absence adds to the sense that education is an impersonal exercise of acquiring knowledge with capabilities specified. As a result, the process of learning that shapes the thinking and lives of those who participate in it is silenced. Education is reduced to what to teach and learn in a system that is presented as confined, controllable and designable. Instead of being fluid, responsive, adaptive or evolutionary, the AC presents as a static list of skills to be acquired and content to be covered, “constructed by policymakers as benign, contemporary, self-evident and ultimately unproblematic” (Ditchburn, 2014, p. 7). In contrast, the Hong Kong education policy Learning to Learn Version 2 (see Fig. 4.2) presents as a fluid system with the goal of operating holistically with constituent parts connected through flow into the larger system. Notably, this visual diagram is only found in official curriculum documents (see, for example, CDC, 2017a, 2017b; Learning Goals, School Curriculum Framework and Planning, n.d.) and is not (re)produced on any national education websites. While the Hong Kong Curriculum Development Council (CDC) (2021) describes the system as “flexible in its design to… foster students’ whole-person development and addresses students’ values, skills and attitudes empowering learning beyond the confines of the classroom” (para 1), the flow chart design nonetheless implies causal relationships leading to the governments preferred outcomes. The title of Hong Kong’s curriculum “Learning to Learn” positions the discourses of “life learning” and “learning in real life” as central to the learning experiences of Hong Kong students (Cheng et al., 2017, p. 4). While LTL describes curriculum content and knowledge, its key components also reflect the view of Hong Kong’s Curriculum Development Committee that “adaptability, creativity, self-direction and collaboration” are “pre-requisites for anyone to succeed” (Education Commission, 2000 p. 3). .As mapped out in Fig. 4.2, Hong Kong’s curriculum demonstrations ambitious policy goals, illustrated as a flow diagram comprised of many pathways. This diagrammatic representation of education highlights the policymakers’ approach to education signified as comprising a workflow or processes in a system. At the top of the visual is a proclamation that the Hong Kong curriculum is broadly based and diverse to enable many choices for Hong Kong students for their “academic, professional and vocational development”. The salience of the statement’s position high in the visual field gives it “greater weight”, signifying its intended importance (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2020, p. 202). The “rainbow”, with the seven colours aligning with the seven learning goals, also carries many implications and is found on a number of other education policy documents (see Curriculum Development Council, 2013a, 2013b). The ubiquitous cultural meaning of the rainbow as a political symbol used

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Fig. 4.2 Learning to learn version 2. note. Education Bureau (EDB). The Government of HKSAR, 2018

to promote discourses of social harmony, inclusiveness and diversity has been highlighted in recent studies by Li (2020) and Sable and Akcay (2010). The strategic positioning of the rainbow at the top of the visual represents a pathway through which students can reach their goals of success. The repetition of colour and shapes in the visual also provides a strong sense of unity and cohesion. Kress and van Leeuwen (2020) label cohesion of colour and shape as “visual rhymes”, the connection of two or more elements of common visual qualities (p. 206). The function of visual rhymes is to stress the correlation between the “promise of the product” and the product itself. While this is a key advertising technique, we argue that this semiotic function is at work here to subjectify the individual as connected to the education product. Colour semiosis, according to Kress and van Leeuwen (2020) “carry a set of affordances from which sign makers select according to their communicative needs”; however, is also culturally salient and therefore difficult to definitively argue (p. 244). Accordingly, the LTL visual, could suggest with is maximally varied palette a range of possibilities for education as its meaning potential. Next to the banner lie two text boxes that read: “nurturing lifelong and self-directed learning capabilities” and “fostering the whole person”. This proclamation suggests that students are supported and encouraged in their pursuit of lifelong and selfdirected learning, exhibiting what Marissa (2020) identifies in her study of verbal and visual semiotic representations of corporate university newsletters as a “discourse of future-orientedness” (p. 582). Future orientedness is discursively operationalised to represent the ideal neoliberal subject as agentive with their gaze oriented

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towards the future for security and success (Marissa, 2020). In this case, the prevailing and contextualised neoliberal logics of the visual reinforce Hong Kong’s need for citizens to develop independent and lifelong learning capabilities, vital to Hong Kong’s continued economic relevancy. The choice of these motherhood statements assertively represents the broader policy aims of ensuring students meet the challenges of twenty-first-century globalisation and knowledge economies (EDB, 2018). This aim is further reinforced through the specific text choices of “critical thinking” “creativity” and “problem-solving” promoted as rhetorical slogans (Morris & Scott, 2003). Further, the structure of the visual reflects how this is to be achieved through an emphasis on “vertical continuity between stages and lateral coherence across disciplines” (EDB, 2018). Notable in the LTL visual is its attention, almost exclusively, to the development of skills necessary for global economic success (Leung & Yuen, 2012). While Singapore’s Teach Less Learn More (TLLM) framework1 (MOE, 2005) shares a similar systems approach to that of Hong Kong’s LTL curriculum, the TLLM curriculum comprises a cyclical ecosystem that connects external and internal factors, teachers, learners, leaders and the MOE as multiple stakeholders through multipronged work-streams (Poon et al., 2017). Like Hong Kong’s Learning to Learn Version 2, the diagrammatic representations associated with TLLM are now primarily available in MOE published reports and publications for teachers (see MOE, 2005, 2013, p. 8), and scholarly publications in which they have been analysed (see, for example, Sharma, 2006; Teo et al., 2013). The diagram is currently unavailable on any official government websites, and due to copyright restrictions, we refer readers to the documents cited in the preceding sentences as sources for the TLLM image to which our analysis here refers. Using the vision of TSLN, the TLLM promotes critical and inquiry-based learning to foster independent thinking, learning and collaboration in students (Tan et al., 2017). In TLLM, learning is positioned as central through the prism of the student. At the heart of this framework is the twenty-first-century learner who is engaged and “prepared for life regardless of their different needs, capabilities, aspirations and backgrounds” (Poon et al., 2017, p. 228). The TSLN approach recognises that there is an “entire ecosystem” of collective “values and beliefs” where schools innovate in an open and sharing culture supported by the MOE (Poon et al., 2017, p. 228). Notable in their absence are parents, families, communities and the wider society. Curriculum policy in the TLLM framework displays a centralised structure with leaders and teachers bearing down on the learner. In the diagram (see Sharma, 2006; Teo et al., 2013), two upward thrusts, depicted as upward arrows, signify ground up initiatives driven by teachers and school leaders to give students support and choice. Downward arrows in the framework identify assistance from the MOE (Koh, 2013; MOE, 2005). Holding the policy together are side arrows of values and beliefs illuminating tacit knowledge assumed by the policymakers and reinforcing the key message of the TSLN to give students space to learn and explore (MOE, 2013). The 1

See diagrammatic representation on page 6 of the TLLM Framework in the Ministry of Education (MOE) (2013).

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centrality of “top-down support for ground up initiatives; curriculum customisation and diverse learners” redefines the core of education from the “why”, “what” and “how” of teaching to “who” we teach (Teo et al., 2013, p. 104). Kress and van Leeuwen (2020) propose that composition places meaningful elements together to provide coherence and to endow these elements with information value. The compositional elements of colour and framing in the TLLM visual create meaning through the repetition of tonal colour in corresponding elements, for example the two arrows depicting time and space, and the white space to signify unity and cohesion of the education policy aims and actors. Additionally, the words “time and space” for teachers and leaders in the visual demonstrate a recognition by policy makers that these dimensions of education are not automatic, implying a commitment on the part of policy makers to provide the time and space required. The simple present tense of these words also makes the act “immediate”, drawing in viewers to the intended narrative that swift change in Singapore’s education context is essential. However, in his article “The Dark Side of Verbs-as-Nouns”, Hitchings (2013) asserts that these types of words, while seeming stable, mechanical and precisely defined, give priority to actions rather than to the people responsible for them, conceal power relations and reduce what’s truly involved in a transaction. As such, these statements are considered to be an instrument of manipulation, and emphasise products and results, rather than the people and processes involved in an act of governmentality. Finally, the choice of the term “customised curriculum”, contained in the central arrow directed at the learners (Sharma, 2006; Teo et al., 2013), is intended to sharpen the focus of children at the centre of education policy. Diverse pathways and outcomes are now possible in this envisioned, but uncertain, future of the twenty-first century. The connotation of the term “customised” suggests explicitly tailoring education to individual needs further reinforcing the student-centred rhetoric. Indeed, the learnercentric view adopted in the TLLM framework is based on neoliberal discourses to meet the “the trajectories of (global) economic conditions…and (local) sociopolitical and cultural–ideological need” (Koh, 2004, p. 335). The success of neoliberal discourse, with its emphasis on the responsibilisation of the individual (Rose, 1999b), requires particular modes of self-governance in ways that meet economic and instrumentalist objectives. As a narrative structure in the Teach Less, Teach More diagram, this idealised model of curriculum practice reiterates its subjectivating function of “working on” the learner in the pursuit of economic and nationalistic goals.

4.6 Conclusions Our exploration of the ways in which visual representations of curriculum policy have articulated education discourse observed that education discourse in some cases was articulated as an object made up of bounded lists and in others a system, or ecosystem of relational process that reinforced education goals and produced idealised social subjects. In an attempt to design the social future of their citizens, the visual representations in each of the education policies examined were symbolic and frequently

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rhetorical to “produce images of reality… bound up with the interests of the social institutions within which the images [were] produced, circulated and read” (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2020, p. 47). When interrogating the visual representation of the AC curriculum, while its structure is multi-dimensional, it is also static in its construction, with learning pictured as set, obscuring entirely the role and significance of students, parents and teachers in the education equation. The three-dimensional cube utilises “curriculum integration as one way of realising the broader goals of education in Australia” (Mockler, 2018, p. 129); however, its complexity is regarded as “monolithic, inflexible and unwieldy” (Donnelly & Wiltshire, 2014, p. 2). Moreover, while diversity is hinted at in the cross-curriculum priorities, the dominant reading is of a student who is viewed as something to be acted upon by teachers using the “3D blueprint” for learning. The place of student choice, and as a self-directed learner who takes responsibility for their own learning, is silent causing the design of the AC to be disconnected from the audience for whom it is intended. Moreover, absent is an articulation of learning itself, “or a set of principles of learning that might guide education’s formulation and subsequent realisation” (Scarino, 2019, p. 61). Hong Kong’s LTL Version 2 curriculum envisages “a new culture in learning and teaching” (Education Commission, 2000, p. 60) where education is shaped through a system’s lens. Students are depicted as circulating through bounded lists considered to be important in a system that consists of many processes. However, the connections and directions between the processes are unclear. While the rhetoric of the curriculum is constructivist and non-linear in nature, allowing students to be active in constructing knowledge, it is not reflective of the reality of Hong Kong’s current education system. A narrow range of academic competencies continue to be valued in preference to the broad, visionary curriculum depicted in the visual representation (Tan, 2020). Moreover, formal assessments persist as “the primary means for upward socio-economic mobility” (Morris & Chan, 1997, p. 260). Recent auditing of the controversial Liberal Studies textbooks and government directives about topics not recommended for discussion in the classroom continues to narrow the curriculum and stymie critical thinking (Chan, 2020). Singapore’s curriculum policy focuses on “transitioning Singapore’s education landscape from an efficiency driven model… to an ability-driven one that “prepares Singaporeans for the demands of a knowledge-based economy” (De Souza, 2018, p. 20). Depicted as an ecosystem, the education community consists of leaders, learners and teachers who are visible and engaged in a never-ending loop of improvement. In the Singaporean text, the implication is that only “formal” learning in school context counts, and the significance of children’s lifeworlds as contributing (see Yelland et al., 2021) is dismissed. Added to the loop are twenty-first-century watchwords intended to equip Singapore’s students with essential competencies, along with concepts of nationalism and citizen loyalty reshaped and renewed (Burbules & Torres, 2000). The visual representation projects “the ‘sanctioned images’ of the attitudes, dispositions, and capabilities of the ‘citizen’ who is to contribute and participate in the process of modernization” of Singapore (Popkewitz, 2000, p. 170), a policy approach we argue isn’t new. “Guided by the projected economic demands of the twenty-first

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century and the government’s interest in keeping Singapore economically relevant”, the idealised social subject is characterised as essential (Goh & Gopinathan, 2008, pp. 29–33). In all three policy contexts, and implicit within each visual diagram, we see the visual representations of national imaginaries about who the “new” or “youngest” citizens are and are becoming through schooling. As publicly available texts, the graphics can be seen as addressing a wide variety of the nation’s stakeholders including, and well beyond, students and the education profession. This includes, for example, parents, employers and voters who are part of the broader lifeworlds and futures of young learner-citizens. The attention given in the visual texts to what is taught, how it is taught and the formation of particular types of subjectivities for those who are taught, function in the service of broader economic and social goals, and idealised learner-citizens constructed in ways that align with policy agendas, cultural values and in the best interest of national futures. The visual texts analysed here tacitly reiterate ideological narratives concerned with education’s purposes and potential which are to produce workers and skills needed for global economic success and the pursuit of nationalist agendas. There are important distinctions, however, between visual policy texts that acknowledge education as an interconnected human endeavour, and those that rely on imagery and bounded lists largely devoid of reference to the students, teachers and societies whose lives and futures are intertwined with education policy and practice.

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Chapter 5

Everyday Learning Looks Like This: Classroom Ethnographies in Three Global Cities I-Fang Lee , Vivienne Wai Man Leung, Kam Ming Lim, Li Mei Johannah Soo, Nanthini Karthikeyan, Clare Bartholomaeus , and Nicola Yelland Abstract This chapter draws on the Global Childhoods ethnographic data from Year 4 classrooms in Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore to elucidate what everyday learning looks like in the three global cities. Acknowledging that learning assumes varied shapes and forms, our primary focus aims to explicate some key features of everyday classroom life in each city, with a focus on time and space. In doing so, we examine the class timetables and explore how time was organised in the schools, and consider the design of classrooms and playgrounds, including the ways in which these spaces were typically used by students and teachers to create learning opportunities. Our analyses are situated within the position of critical onto-epistemological perspective though which we offered critical insights to provoke new understandings about how educational practices are deeply situated within local sociocultural contexts with greater implications for broader learning outcomes and students’ educational success. We seek to provide discussions that are both critical and comparative for rethinking the ways in which opportunities, challenges and diversity in the three education I-F. Lee (B) School of Education, The University of Newcastle, Ourimbah, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] V. W. M. Leung The Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, Hong Kong K. M. Lim · L. M. J. Soo Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore N. Karthikeyan Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore, Singapore C. Bartholomaeus · N. Yelland Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] N. Yelland e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I-F. Lee et al. (eds.), Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities, Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0_5

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systems became evident from the classroom ethnographies. We also consider the implications of structured learning for shaping children’s multiple ways of being, belonging and becoming learners. Keywords Classroom ethnography · School timetables · Classroom design · Structured learning · Playgrounds Growing up in the twenty-first century, schools play a key role in the majority of children’s lives. Across the compulsory education systems in the three global cities1 of Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore, primary school children spend an average of more than nine months a year in schools as a key component of their childhood. Every day, children in the three global cities spend six to nearly eight hours with their teachers and peers within the contexts of compulsory schooling. In these schools, children’s everyday routines are structured with organised timetables and pre-planned learning activities that are guided by mandated national curriculum frameworks. The types of structured learning and teaching in the classrooms follow the centralised curriculum reform policy statements to depict the learning experiences and desired outcomes through schooling. Social interactions that happen during the structured teaching and learning in schools between teachers/students and students/students act as everyday encounters which help to shape children’s experiences and worldviews, nested within the parameters of school activity, rules and sociocultural expectations (i.e. see McLaren, 2015). In this chapter, we conceptualise schools as sociocultural institutions (see Popkewitz, 2018a, 2018b). This critical perspective lays a conceptual foundation for us to interrogate and understand what learning looks like in schools within the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of these three global cities in the twenty-first century. Following this theoretical (re)positioning of schools and the formation of students as well as studenthoods, we draw from our classroom ethnographies to provide examples of children’s everyday encounters and learning experiences in their classrooms and schools. Moving away from a conventional comparative analysis and discussion of what constitutes the best schooling and learning among the three global cities, we highlight children’s everyday living and learning experiences by looking at two key aspects: the organisation of time and structured learning activities, and the built environment, such as the design of classrooms and playgrounds and how these spaces were typically used by students and teachers. When analysing these two aspects (time and space) of children’s learning in schools, we seek to present narratives of learning opportunities, challenges and diversities in each of the three education systems. We interrogate their implications for shaping children’s multiple ways of being, belonging and becoming in classrooms and schools to gain a deeper understanding of children’s lifeworlds within the three education systems. Through 1

Global cities are defined as cities that are intricately connected with world politics, trade and economy, and serve as central nodes in global economic network (Sassen, 1991). Hong Kong, Singapore and Melbourne are classified as Alpha level global cities, with Alpha being the highest level in a 3-level classification system (Globalization and World Cities Research Network, 2020).

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these classroom ethnographies in the three global cities, we aim to provide critical insights and careful reflections on contemporary schooling systems and their impact on the identities and learning potential of children in the Year 4 age range.

5.1 Schools and Schooling in Contemporary Education Systems In reflecting on the lifeworlds of 9- and 10-year-old children in Year 4 in the three global cities, it is immediately apparent that attendance in schools takes up a significant amount of children’s time. Across the three global cities in this research, children spend a substantial amount of time in school on an everyday basis during the school terms, primarily in their classrooms. Some may also attend after school care or classes and holiday programmes, particularly if their parents are in full-time employment. While education has been mobilised as a basic right for children through the global movement of Education For All (EFA), to meet the measurable learning goals outlined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO),2 the types of schools and schooling systems vary within and across different sociocultural settings and geopolitical spaces. Despite the grand vision of equality in EFA to meet all children’s learning needs, in practice, a global race among different countries to achieve the “best” education system within the international community has inevitably occurred. Reflecting a global neoliberal educational discourse that places a strong emphasis on outcome-based learning through effective schooling, a growing dominant definition of what a successful education system may entail looks at students’ academic performance and reduces learning outcomes and academic achievement to a competitive international league table of high stakes tests. For instance, there are several well-known large-scale international assessments such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). As a precursor to PISA (completed by 15-year-olds), the TIMSS and PIRLS high stakes tests are completed in Year 4 (TIMSS and PIRLS) and Year 8 (TIMSS only) globally. While not as prominent in the media and education policy discussions as PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS nevertheless act as the precursor to global high stakes testing in what are regarded as the “key” areas of mathematics, science and reading. Although

2

In 2015 at the World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, six key education goals were outlined with the aim to meet the learning needs of all children. The six goals include: (1) expand early childhood care and education, (2) provide free and compulsory primary education for all, (3) promote learning and life skills for young people and adults, (4) increase adult literacy by 50%, (5) achieve gender parity by 2005 and gender equality by 2015 and (6) improve the quality of education. Along with the agreement of the six goals, UNESCO has also developed a set of Education for All Development Index (EDI) for the goals to become measurable. For a detailed report, see https://une sdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000121147.

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TIMSS and PIRLS are more relevant to the age group of students in the Global Childhoods project, PISA has been gaining more media reports as it has been mobilised as a systematic, reputable and objective international comparative scheme to measure levels of students’ academic achievements at 15 years of age. Embedded within the global participation and aligned reporting of international high stake testing schemes such as TIMSS, PIRLS and PISA results is a problematic set of indicators regarding the perceived effectiveness of education systems. As Popkewitz (2011) elucidates, “The politics of PISA, I argue, are in the principles that order what children should know, how that knowing is made possible, and issues of inclusion and exclusion embodied in these practices” (p. 31). The popular but problematic systems of reasoning that are mobilised or made explicit through TIMSS, PIRLS and PISA have reshaped what “successful” contemporary education system would look like. A simplified linear logic of treating students’ levels of academic performance in these specific tests as a key indicator of the effectiveness of schooling as “successful” education system has been mobilised. What is dangerously at work through international test schemes such as TIMSS, PIRLS or PISA is a production of high-performing students are “competent” students who would be(come) competitive citizens in a global knowledge economy as they “grow up” to become professionals, high skill labourers or be more job-ready and productive. In fact, this view about TIMSS, PIRLS and PISA rankings has been deemed as one of the key indicators when reforming for a “successful” education system in the dominant global circulation of reform discourses. Countries that are performing well in TIMSS, PIRLS and PISA, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, have been upheld (or assumed) as model education systems by some governments and education analysts without in-depth and broader discussions beyond the test scores and results (e.g. see Carnoy & Rothstein, 2013; Ravitch, 2013). For example, Carnoy’s (2015) critical review of the recent critiques on PISA has highlighted a need to problematise the link between a nation’s PISA scores and its future economic development. Building on the critical reflections of TIMSS, PIRLS and PISA that have sought to assert that educational success cannot be simplified or narrowly defined based on test scores (e.g. see d’Agnese, 2015), our discussions in the Global Childhoods project aim to investigate and explore what different notions and versions of educational success could be imagined. Breaking away from a neoliberal conceptualisation of what constitutes an equation of the successful education system that has placed a strong(er) focus on outcome-based learning as the primary goal of schooling in the global political economy, our conceptualisation of school and schooling allows us to ask different sets of questions about learning and pay different attention to what learning looks like in the three global cities. To better understand what “successful” education might mean and look like, we take up a combination of critical and post-structural theoretical frameworks to (re)conceptualise what schools are and how schools are constructed. This onto-epistemological approach to a critical conceptual understanding about education systems, schools and schooling allows us to incorporate children’s everyday learning as a significant part of their lifeworlds

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that will shape their be(com)ing successful citizens. Furthermore, the Global Childhoods project moves beyond a focus on competitive performance in TIMSS, PIRLS and PISA to consider the everyday lifeworlds of children at school, providing an important context for these tests and the national education systems more broadly. Schools exist as sociocultural institutions in contemporary education systems (Ylimaki et al., 2017). Schools are constructs of our own creation that reflect our national and global social imaginaries. The existence and structure of schools in contemporary education systems are shaped and situated within the intricate web of geopolitical, sociocultural and economic relations to (re)inscribe sets of dominant way(s) of being and becoming. As Apple (1993) has asserted from a critical theory perspective: Education is deeply implicated in the politics of culture. The curriculum is never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge, somehow appearing in the texts and classrooms of a nation. It is always part of a selective tradition, someone’s selection, some group’s vision of legitimate knowledge. It is produced out of the culture, political, and economic conflicts, tensions, and compromises that organize and disorganize a people. (p. 1, emphasis in original)

In the Global Childhoods project, each global city has its own version of what constitutes official knowledge, and this is represented in the form of centralised national curriculum guidelines or frameworks for the compulsory years of schooling. Within the context of schooling in contemporary education systems, national curriculum guidelines or frameworks are the main systems of reasoning or socio-political logic that provide an outline to define the parameters of what needs to be taught and learnt according to the local “authority”. While the versions of “official knowledge” may appear to be different across different sociocultural settings, a common set of core socio-political logic about what counts as successful education has been foregrounded to perpetuate the dominant neoliberal notion of outcome-based learning as key measurement of what is regarded as “successful schooling” (e.g. see Chapter 4 in this volume). Within this trajectory of thought, schooling entails a learning process with planned activities with set schedules and structured teaching and learning experiences. In schools, children’s everyday routines are organised within the educational parameters of specifically designed teaching and learning in the classroom settings. Learning in schools is never “free without rules” in classrooms, but systematically organised, such as with specific instructions and expectations conveyed in textbooks, via homework activities and in the completion of worksheets structured to elicit and demonstrate measurable academic learning outcomes. This occurs to re-inscribe what constitutes successful education and learning. For instance, in Hong Kong, a new socioeconomic notion of “lifelong learning” has been mobilised as a key education reform slogan to re-define educational goals (see Chan, 2000; Forestier & Crossley, 2015; Kennedy, 2004; Lee, 2007). In the Basic Curriculum Guide for the new and reformed 15-year school curriculum framework, the priority of learning values and attitudes is creating new sociocultural definition of “success”. Furthermore, as noted in the curriculum framework, the 7 key learning goals of primary school focus on promoting the whole-person development of students to enhance their proficiency of

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English and Chinese (including Putonghua), strengthen their self-directed learning skills, develop their potential and adopt a healthy lifestyle.3 To achieve these goals, there are 8 key learning areas which include Chinese Language Education, English Language Education, Mathematics Education, General Studies (Personal, Social and Humanities Education, Science Education, Technology Education), Arts Education and Physical Education. Primary students in Hong Kong are expected to develop learning to learn capabilities as well as positive values and attitudes for achieving the educational aims of whole-person development and lifelong learning (Curriculum Development Council, 2014). In Australia, the Education Goals for Young Australians focus on “excellence and equity”, and all young people being “confident and creative individuals”, “successful lifelong learners” and “active and informed members of the community” (Education Council, 2019). Government and Catholic schools in Melbourne follow the Victorian Curriculum, which is largely based on the Australian Curriculum, with a focus on eight key learning areas (the Arts, English, Health and Physical Education, the Humanities, Languages, Mathematics, Science and Technologies). In Singapore, the pursuit of creativity and innovation has manifested as a new vision for children’s learning (e.g. see Koh, 2004; Tan & Gopinathan, 2000; Tan & Ng, 2021). Primary school students are taught the subjects English Language, Mother Tongue Language, Mathematics, Science, Art, Music, Physical Education, Social Studies and Character and Citizenship Education (CCE). Multiple global waves of education reforms have involved the re-making of national curriculum guidelines and frameworks at local levels to re(con)figure what “successful” learning should look like. In this way, children’s everyday learning is (re)shaped and (re)constituted through the formation and implementation of local/national curriculum guidelines under the influences of global circulation of what are regarded as being “effective” education systems.

5.2 Everyday Learning in Schools: The Structures of Time and Space in Children’s Lifeworlds The magnitude of everyday classroom life and learning experience in schools takes up a large portion of children’s lifeworlds in today’s compulsory education systems. In the three global cities of Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore, Year 4 students are spending somewhere between six to nearly eight hours in classroom settings on weekdays during school terms, and much of this time is spent indoors. To better understand what children’s everyday experiences of learning in schools may look like, the multi-site research team conducted classroom ethnographies in Year 4 classrooms (9–10 years old) in public schools in each of the three global cities. We immersed ourselves as observers in the Year 4 classrooms, with the aim to describe and analyse 3

The Basic Curriculum Guide reflects the ongoing development and changes of educational vision in Hong Kong. For an official articulation of the values and attitudes, see https://www.edb.gov.hk/ en/curriculum-development/renewal/framework.html.

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the everyday experiences for the Year 4 students. We conducted the classroom ethnographies during the school year of 2018–2019 in Hong Kong and 2019 in Melbourne and Singapore. In each city, this represented one week near the beginning of the school year and another week in the second half of the school year. In Hong Kong, the first set of classroom ethnographies started in October 2018 as the children entered Year 4, while in Singapore and Melbourne this occurred in March/April 2019. We observed and took fieldnotes as the children participated and completed planned learning tasks in their classrooms by their teachers and paid attention to their social interactions during these classroom learning periods, with additional consideration of their lunch and recess breaks. The fieldnotes thus documented both individual and peer interactions and exchanges with teachers. Before going into the schools to conduct the classroom ethnographies, our research team had initial discussions about the ways in which we would organise the multi-site ethnographies. It was important for our research team to reach shared understandings of how to keep detailed ethnographic fieldnotes and speak informally with students and teachers, with attention to culturally and socially appropriateness in the three global cities. During our time in the classrooms and schools, we also took photographs of learning artefacts such as homework samples, in-class worksheets and various formats of book work completed by the children. In the following sections, we identify as well as analyse the key constructs of time and space associated with structuring children’s learning and shaping their lifeworlds. Our cross-cultural ethnographic data of children’s classroom life are grounded in the everyday practices of teaching and learning in schools. Drawing on the classroom ethnographies, we offer narratives of children’s classroom experiences to illustrate what children’s everyday classroom life and experience of learning look like.

5.2.1 The School Timetable: Organising Time and Schedules Time, as constructed and reflected in the format of a timetable, is a critical dimension for analysis and discussion to enrich our understanding of children’s experiences of schooling (Cattaneo et al., 2017). In this ethnographic study of children’s learning, classroom timetables are treated as an educational artefact that provides detailed documentation of how children’s learning experiences are regulated and governed in classrooms and schools. A critical review into the timetables can enable us to see how children’s time is organised, supervised and structured by adults in schools. Children’s living and learning experiences in schools and classrooms are shaped by the production of timetables. Therefore, our focus on the ways in which children’s everyday learning time blocks or periods are organised is nested within our critical theoretical framework to reconceptualise what structured learning in classrooms and schools may look like and mean for children. As illustrated in Table 5.1, we highlight one weekday from Year 4 students’ timetables from two schools in each of the three global cities to provide an overall and general understanding of how children’s learning and classroom living experiences

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are organised into segments over each day of the school week. We focus on one weekday in each school as an example day, noting that the overall structure of the chosen day (start and end times, break times) is repeated each day throughout the week. There are multiple ways of analysing the meanings of timetables. For instance, a first glance of the timetables reveals the variation of school hours, which cannot be overlooked. Overall, the average school hours in the two Hong Kong schools appear to be slightly longer and can add up to nearly eight hours a day, whereas a six-and-a-half-hour school day is common in the two schools in Melbourne. In Singapore, both schools had a 6-h school day. However, in the public schools that we observed in Singapore, some students would stay for extended learning periods after school once or twice a week for their Co-Curricular Activities (CCA) for an additional two to three hours, and/or remedial lessons for those who need additional academic learning support for one to two hours (Low et al., 2017). The times we observed in the participating schools are largely reflective of many schools within each of these locations. As these timetables have illustrated, the children in the three global cities are spending somewhere between 6 and 8 h during weekdays in schools participating in classroom-based learning activities. When children are spending long(er) hours in schools, the roles and functions of timetables need to be further problematised. Conceptualising schools as sociocultural institutions that (re)shape the making of the children into students who are be(com)ing school subjects (e.g. students), it is important to map which threads of sociocultural and educational logics are driving the organisation of the timetables. Therefore, when looking at the organisation of time in schools, in this chapter we highlight two notable and common features in the timetables across all three global cities: (1) less time for recess and unstructured learning and (2) more time for structured learning periods relating to key learning areas or subjects such as Mathematics, Science and English/Literacy.

5.2.1.1

Less Time for Recess and Unstructured Learning

As shown in Table 5.1, in one of the Hong Kong schools (School B), Year 4 students are allocated one block of 20 min and another block of 10 min recess time in the morning, 45 min for lunch with implied recess in the form of free play during this block of lunch time in the mid-day. In School A, students had 25 min of recess in the morning and 40 min for lunch. What we have observed here is that during a full school day of nearly eight hours, the 9- to 10-year-old children in this school in Hong Kong have very limited opportunities for “unstructured” time with minimal teacher supervision in the school setting. In our classroom ethnography observations, we noted that these blocks of recess time in the morning would often disappear as a class transition time while another 45 min of lunch time with assumed recess time in the form of play time during the remaining lunch time period could become the only “free” time to build or maintain social bonds with their peers and classmates. In both Singapore schools, there is a 30-min recess time in the morning. It is important to

8:55–9:10 Class Teacher Period

9:10–9:50 Music

9:50–10:30 Mathematics

10:30–10:55 Recess

9:00–9:30

9:30–10:00

10:00–10:30

10:30–11:00

9:50–10:40 Numeracy

9:00–9:50 Reading

Melbourne—School A

10:10–10:45 10:40–11:20 General Studies Recess

9:50–10:10 Recess

8:40–9:50 Chinese (Taught in Putonghua)

8:40–8:55 Exercises

8:30–9:00

Hong Kong—School B

8:05–8:40 Morning routine/Home room teacher session

Hong Kong—School A

8:00–8:30

7:30–8:00

Time

Writing

Reading

Sound check/Vocab/Conferencing

Melbourne—School B

Table 5.1 An example weekday from timetables from Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore

Science Lab

Recess Art/Craft

(continued)

English Language

7:45–9:00 Mathematics

Mathematics

English Language

Singapore—School B

Singapore—School A

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13:25–13:40 Quiet Reading

13:40–14:15 English

12:55–13:35 Lunch

13:35–13:50 Reading

13:50–14:30 Reading Class

14:30–15:10 Putonghua

13:00–13:30

13:30–14:00

14:00–14:30

14:30–15:00

14:50–15:30 ICT/Robotic

14:15–14:50 Homework Time

12:40–13:25 Lunch + Recess

11:30–12:05 Mathematics

12:30–1:00

11:35–12:55 English

11:30–12:00

11:20–11:30 Recess

10:45–11:20 PE

12:05–12:40 Religion Study

10:55–11:35 Chinese (Taught in Putonghua)

11:00–11:30

Hong Kong—School B

12:00–12:30

Hong Kong—School A

Time

Table 5.1 (continued)

14:40–15:30 Drama

13:50–14:40 Italian

13:00–13:50 Lunch

12:10–13:00 Writers workshop

11:20–12:10 Well-being

Melbourne—School A

Music

PE—4A STEM—4B Art—4C *

Numeracy

Lunch

Melbourne—School B

Higher Chinese Language

Art/Craft

Character and Citizenship Education

Singapore—School A

(continued)

Mathematics

Social Studies

Mother Tongue

Recess

Singapore—School B

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15:10–15:40 Tutoring

15:40–16:45 After School Clubs (Selective or additional fee)

15:00–15:30

15:30–16:00

15:30–15:40 End-of-day routine/Home room teacher session

Hong Kong—School B

Melbourne—School A

Melbourne—School B

Singapore—School A

Notes This table draws on the timetable from Tuesday of the first visit to each school as an example of a school day in the six schools a Class splits into three groups to go to a specialist lesson (each group has each of these lessons once over a week)

16:30–17:00

16:00–16:30

Hong Kong—School A

Time

Table 5.1 (continued) Singapore—School B

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note that in these public primary school, as the typical school day ends by 1:30 pm and it is then the students have their lunch after leaving school, a short 10-min snack break around 12 noon has been built into their everyday schedule (although this is not shown on the timetables). In School A in Melbourne, the children have 40 min of recess time in the morning to play outside, with the last 10 min of this spent eating as a group with their teacher outside of the classroom. Then, in the afternoon, the children have 50 min of lunchtime outside, including the last 10 min spent eating, again as a group with their teacher outside of the classroom. At School B in Melbourne, the timetable was flipped so that students had their lunch break first (1 h, with the first 10 min spent eating lunch in the classroom and the rest spent outside), with their recess break for 30 min outside in the afternoon. This overall calculation of recess and lunch time in the timetable examples has allowed us to rethink the ways in which children are governed as “school subjects and learners” who are expected to follow rules of the everyday class routines and learning timetables. Exemplified through the selected timetables, children’s days in school settings are highly regulated as their living and learning are pre-organised and pre-determined by timetables. The ratios between structured formal learning and unstructured informal learning in timetables can reveal the educational value of what counts in contemporary schooling. Recess and lunch time as a form of unstructured time for different types of learning in the school buildings such as “free social time” or “physical movements” are very limited. In our classroom ethnographies, on typical school days, long hours of sitting and working in the classrooms have appeared to become a common schooling practice for learning in contemporary schooling. While it is important to note that unstructured recess and lunch time should not be deemed as equivalent of Physical Education (PE) time, these examples of timetables have illustrated that schooling prioritises structured academic learning over physical health and well-being. Despite a plethora of inter-disciplinary research findings on the positive benefits of recess time in primary schools for children’s positive outcomes in cognitive, social, emotion and physical development (e.g. see Bundy et al., 2011; Carriedo & Cecchini, 2022; Holmes et al., 2006; Layne et al., 2021; Pellegrini & Bohn, 2005; Pellegrini & Holmes, 2006; Ramstetter et al., 2010), the subtracting of recess in children’s school hours seems to be a prevailing schooling practice.

5.2.1.2

More Time for Structured Learning

The allocation of longer hours of structured learning for key learning areas in primary years such as mathematics (or Numeracy) and languages (such as English, Chinese, mother tongues or foreign languages) is a common schooling practice in timetabling among the schools we observed in the three global cities. The class timetables elucidate how children are expected to learn (and to be taught) as they take on the role of students to meet their local sociocultural expectations and national constructions of educational outcomes, standards and success. Although each global city has different aims and goals for its education system with variance in curriculum framework planning and pedagogical practice, a closer look into the ways in which the timetables are

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organised has allowed us to pose critical questions to reconceptualise what learning has been prioritised to encompass hopes to produce and achieve education success. It is also important to note that the examples of the timetables provided here are not to be representative for all schools, but to provide an overview for what a day of learning in the contexts of schools may mean for Year 4 students in the three global cities. To take Hong Kong as an example, as traced in the timetables from two different primary schools, the required/core subjects of English and Chinese in children’s timetables are taking up longer learning hours which could indicate that children’s language learning is emphasised and positioned within the official educational policy of Biliteracy and Trilingualism to reflect Hong Kong’s linguistically complex and diverse learning context (e.g. see Wang & Kirkpatrick, 2015). In School A in Hong Kong, there is not only Chinese taught in Putonghua, but children also learn Putonghua as single subject, whereas, in School B, Putonghua is the medium of instruction in the Chinese class. The time spent on particular language learning reflects its significance of educational and political emphasis on cultural identity within the assemblage of Chinese-ness in Hong Kong education system. Similarly, in Singapore, the official school subjects outlined in the two examples of the timetable certainly reflect how children’s learning is situated within the parameter of the national curriculum framework in Singapore. While English is one of the official languages, carving out a time block in children’s already packed learning timetable for mother tongues reflects the importance of acknowledging a diverse and multicultural contemporary society in Singapore. Ultimately, the primary school timetables in Singapore have a focus on subjects included in the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) at the end of primary school in Year 6 (Mathematics, English Language, Mother Tongue and Science), with less time dedicated to other subjects. In Melbourne, the two examples of children’s timetables reflect the sociocultural and educational expectations of the Victorian Curriculum which are positioned within the larger scope of a national vision of the Australian Curriculum to prescribe learning goals, standards and outcomes. The key focus in the Melbourne timetables was on literacy (English, Reading, Spelling) and numeracy, with less time dedicated to additional learning areas. Across the three education systems, it is important to note that while the terms of references regarding key learning areas or subjects in the timetables may vary between the three global cities, the organisation and arrangement of children’s learning periods or blocks of hours do emerge to match the anticipated learning objectives and outcomes as depicted in their national curriculum frameworks. Reflecting a strong(er) emphasis on academic learning, these examples of timetables also allow us to raise critical questions regarding whose knowledge counts and the construction of official knowledge in each of the global city. In brief for a synthesis concerning what timetables may mean for children’s everyday living and learning in classrooms and schools across the primary schools in the three global cities, our data showed that children have limited free time without structured learning in schools. Melbourne has relatively more free time, while Hong Kong students often lose their recess to formal learning periods, and students in

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Singapore start and finish school earlier and therefore do not have a lunch break in school. Through looking at the timetables, we “see” how children’s everyday learning experiences are organised in schools. The minimal provision of “free time” such as recess and lunch time serves to illustrate the rigidity of contemporary childhoods in primary school years as children’s agency and freedom to make choices during school hours have been restricted. In contemporary primary schools and schooling, the drive to academic performance has been foregrounded to become a top priority in education reforms, whereas the importance of recess time during school hours has become somewhat limited and restricted. Therefore, it is common to see that school timetables are filled with structured learning activities that are filled with the prescribed contents of “official knowledge” outlined in the centralised or national curriculum guidelines. The presence of learning units in what are viewed as key learning areas (particularly Mathematics and languages) also reflects centralised curriculum guidelines at the national level to follow a set schedule for meeting and producing the expected learning outcomes. It has been noted that timetables are utilised as a means of school and pupil management and administration (Davies & Kerry, 1999; Leithwood & Sun, 2018). A school timetable can be treated as documentation with specific details of student learning times that reflects the distribution, allocation and use of education resources (Gromada & Shewbridge, 2016). The structure of timetables highlights what types of learning are valued, how the lessons are to be planned and taught, and how to count the quantifiable learning hours with public funding in school settings as children’s learning time is deemed to be a social and educational investment which would yield good national economic dividends for the future (Cattaneo et al., 2017; Levin, 1986). The analysis and discussion of relations between the “social” investment in learning time and academic performance have appeared in comparative studies by the OECD looking at the results of PISA (Gromada & Shewbridge, 2016). Drawing from a critical perspective, our analysis of Year 4 students’ learning timetables in the schools has uncovered different layers of meanings about schooling and what learning may look like in schools. In our study, as we conceptualise timetables as a technology for governing children’s learning, being and becoming, it becomes important for us to ask a different set of questions concerning the alchemy of children as school subjects/students (e.g. see Popkewitz, 2004, 2018a). For instance, when analysing the timetables, we continue to pose questions about what types of learning would reflect more sociocultural values, what type of learning is cultivated and for what purposes, and whether they mirror the national imaginaries about education success across the school systems in the three global cities. These types of questions are guiding the ways in which we think about the politics of timetables. Embedded within the socio-political webs of curriculum planning, timetables provide us with an anchor point to investigate what living and learning in contemporary primary schools look like in each of our three cities. The pressure to perform academically has been further magnified in contemporary schooling especially when the results of international assessment schemes like TIMSS, PIRLS and PISA have become so pre-eminent and embody neoliberal socio-political values concerning social imaginaries about hopes for future success.

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5.2.2 The Built Environments in Children’s Lifeworlds: School Buildings and Classrooms Schools are purpose-built environments that reflect sociocultural understandings and political economic functionality. From the perspectives of social, cultural and political geographers, “schools are central to the social geographies of everyday life” (Collins & Coleman, 2008, p. 281). In considering the politics of childhood, Kallio (2007) noted that schools are semi-public spaces where “the micro-politics of children and young people’s personal experiences and the macro-politics of the public sphere should be considered in parallel with each other” (p. 121). From a critical epistemological perspective, the schools are sites of policy enactments where sociocultural and political economy threads of rationalities about how children should be taught and what learning should count are entangled to shape children’s learning experiences. As children are spending long hours in schools, the structures of built environments such as classrooms and playgrounds in schools are reflecting the tensions and priorities in children’s education. Therefore, conceptualising primary schools as built environments where specific types of educational and social practices are cultivated through the teaching as well as the set-up and design of “learning spaces” in schools should not be overlooked. While a more in-depth analysis and discussion on the different national curricula are not a key focus of this chapter, it is important to note that national curriculum frameworks, or learning standards and outcomes, are a significant force for defining what children should learn and how they should be taught in order to achieve academic outcomes. In this section of discussion, we shift our analytical attention to focus on school as built environment by looking at the designs of indoor and outdoor spaces such as general and specialised classrooms, playgrounds, gyms or multi-purposes halls. Such analysis and discussion about school as a social space allow us to question how these built environments embody layers of sociocultural meanings to (re)enforce the importance of achieving educational objectives. Within the spaces of school buildings, children are experiencing learning as their individual as well as shared living and learning experiences with their classmates as a social and academic cohort. Hence, the spaces of schools are where the individuals are being grouped together to share common experiences of being, belonging and becoming. How school grounds are conceptualised as a space, including their intended purposes, and how school buildings are designed to cultivate particular types of learning experiences and outcomes are critical questions that have guided our analysis of children’s everyday learning and living experiences as schools make up a significant part of their lifeworlds. Highlighting the school playground as an example, Thomson (2007) argued that: The school playground symbolizes an adult (architects, local authorities, play equipment suppliers, teachers) understanding of children and their requirements. This space denotes that adults recognize that children should have some type of dedicated environment in which to express their culture and behaviour. However, it has to be remembered first and foremost that it is an institutional educational space governed by adults’ perception of appropriate behaviour. (p. 487. emphasis added)

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As Thomson (2007) envisages playgrounds as a school space for sociocultural governance, this opens up a new discursive space for us to (re)conceptualise physical spaces in schools as sites for sociocultural and educational administration, in which children are expected to behave appropriately and act accordingly to follow the school rules and policies. As a common and shared space in schools, the playground could be one of the few spaces where adult supervision and regulation could be less prominent. Other spaces in the schools, whether it is indoors within the classroom settings or outdoors in the playground, conforming to the school rules as obedient students with docile bodies are an enactment of policies as well as sociocultural administration for be(com)ing. As illustrated in the collection of photos from our fieldwork, the primary schools in the three global cities are located in urban neighbourhoods where accessibility to natural environments are relatively limited, particularly in Hong Kong and Singapore. As seen in the images, one of the schools in Hong Kong is located in a high-density public estate community where the concepts of “free” and “open” natural spaces in the school need to be geographically situated within the web of sociocultural and economic factors (see Fig. 5.1). Therefore, the school playground is not spacious, but a flat area of open space with concrete/cement without fixed structures. In contrast, in the Melbourne school examples, both of the school grounds were fairly large in size, with playing fields with grass and basketball courts which had artificial surfaces, and several surrounding trees (see Fig. 5.2). Similar to other public schools in Singapore, the two public schools studied in Singapore shares the same building style of having one U- or L-shaped school ground/playground space in middle of the school as a style of common design of the built environment (see Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.1 Hong Kong School B playground

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Fig. 5.2 Melbourne School B playground Fig. 5.3 Singapore School B playground

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Fig. 5.4 Hong Kong School B classroom

In terms of classroom design, the schools in all three locations focused on arrangements of tables and chairs, although these were set up slightly differently, and the schools in Melbourne also had space for sitting on the floor as a group. The two primary classrooms that we observed in Hong Kong had about 25–30 students per class. The typical set-up for classrooms would be desks in rows with a blackboard or a whiteboard up at the front with a classroom computer and projector (see Fig. 5.4). At one of the Melbourne schools (School B), the Year 4 classroom catered for a large group of students (approximately 60), with tables and chairs arranged in groups and a space on the carpet in the middle of the classroom for the students to sit as a whole class group with the teachers sitting or standing at the front (see Fig. 5.5). In contrast, the other Melbourne school had fewer than 25 students which is more common in Australian primary schools, and they were located in a smaller classroom also with tables and chairs arranged in groups and a space on the carpet for children to sit as a group. In the classrooms in Singapore, it is common to have about 40 students in one class. Generally, students are seated in pairs or in rows all facing the front where the screen/board is situated (see Fig. 5.6). Some classrooms have a small reading corner and a sink/tap for washing hands at the back of the classroom. Despite cultural and social differences among the three global cities of Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore, when looking at the images of these built environments, it is immediately apparent that these buildings and spaces are schools. Inevitably, contemporary schools are built environments with some common features or shared characteristics. While the locality of a school may create certain pre-determined limitations or boundaries for the ways in which the types of everyday activities can be carried out in the built environment, it is important to look at the complex spatialtemporal relation between school spaces and the types of activities that take place, to reconsider how children’s learning and lived experiences are shaped and regulated by their environment. Additionally, when placing these images of classrooms and playgrounds together with the examples of timetables, it becomes possible to question and rethink what we regard as being desirable learning activities and what constitutes appropriate behaviours or sociocultural practices in schools. More importantly,

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Fig. 5.5 Melbourne School B classroom

Fig. 5.6 Singapore School B classroom

this onto-epistemological approach of reconceptualising spatial-temporal mapping of school grounds as children’s everyday lifeworlds allowed us to rethink the construction of “normal” schooling practice and experience in which children are becoming school subjects.

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5.2.3 Connecting Time Use and Space Linking the concepts of time and space by weaving the timetables (Table 5.1) and the images of the classrooms and school spaces (Fig. 5.1) together, our analysis seeks to create and offer a different conceptual assemblage of schooling to account for children’s learning experiences. Placing this spatial-temporal assemblage of schools and schooling experiences in the centre of discussion has also reiterated the effects of dominant global emphases on outcome-based learning as successful education systems as part of children’s lifeworlds. Such analysis has interjected a momentum for us to be critical of the paradoxical formations and practices of what are considered as desirable and appropriate behaviours in schools. The expectations of desirable and appropriate behaviours are linked with the sociocultural denotation of what a “good” student should look like through which a construction of “studenthood” is at work (Lee, 2021; Lee & Yelland, 2017). This construction of studenthood is perpetuated and nested within a larger neoliberal system of reasoning relating to a dominant global discourse of student achievements and educational success. In each of the global cities of this research, the Year 4 students are spending the majority of their school hours inside classrooms for teacher-led and structured academic learning within the scope of an approved or official national curriculum framework. As demonstrated through the timetables, the desirable learning activities are the academic subjects such as mathematics, languages (i.e. English, Putonghua, Mother tongues) and science, although science was less of a focus in Melbourne. A global competitive academic culture is at work in this construct; it is reflected in the designs of the local built environments where indoor spaces such as classrooms are the key feature in school grounds. A critical discussion of the role of recess and lunch cannot be ignored as break times are an important segment of children’s learning experiences through schooling (Brez & Sheets, 2017; Zavacky & Michael, 2017). In the debates regarding structured versus unstructured learning, the ongoing debate of the play-based versus outcome-based learning has been made subservient and even redundant. While the literature on play-based learning in primary school years has been growing, demonstrating the effects of play on children’s learning and cognitive development (e.g. see Jay & Knaus, 2018; Pellegrini & Bohn, 2005), the practices of outcome-based learning have been continuing and are reinforced in neoliberal discourses through the global circulations of education reform policies that promote the concept of accountability. Holding schools and teachers accountable for children’s academic performance is embedded within the everyday practice of children’s academic learning in schools. Therefore, the restricted time for recess and lunch in timetables and limited spaces for playgrounds are inextricably linked with the dominant sociocultural emphasis on what constitutes effective learning outcomes in contemporary education systems.

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5.3 Some Concluding Thoughts Our worlds are closely connected under ongoing waves of globalisation and characterised by rapid exchanges and faster flows of ideas. For example, under the neoliberal political imaginary for more productive and competitive national futures, the trends of education policy borrowing in which the cross-national attraction of educational success and transnational socio-political phenomenon of a race to be the best educational system are prevailing (Auld & Morris, 2014; Ball, 2012; You, 2020). The international flows to create optimal education systems are woven into layers that are reflective of both micro- and macro-influences as a new “truth” to shape educational practices in which children’s learning and living are being governed and self-governed under the effects of a neoliberal vision that appears to promise better educational success within a bigger national imaginary. The neoliberal notion of what constitutes a successful education system perpetuates a singular narrative of which quantitative indicators are aligned with measurable goals and comparable outcomes as a dominant set of the key predictors for progress. Thus, children’s everyday learning and living experiences in schools as a significant part of their lifeworlds have been re(con)figured and reduced to structured learning that has various degrees of emphasis on outcome-based learning through schooling. In this chapter, through conceptualising schools as sociocultural institutions, we see children’s everyday learning and living experiences in schools are defined and nested within a strong global academic culture. In our discussion, we have drawn on the examples of school timetables as they act as a de facto definition of what a typical learning day at school should look like and placed these in the context of schools as built environments that are designed for structured learning. As children are spending even more hours in schools, we see schools as a significant part of children’s lifeworlds. Children’s everyday learning experiences are shaped through teachers’ intentional teaching and schools’ curriculum guidelines as well as in the implementation of policies that reflect various and different national visions of what is regarded as contributing to progress and development for its youngest citizens under the looming global circulation of a dominant political economy narrative in education. The classroom ethnographic data of children’s school life collected in this study have allowed us to consider what learning looks like across the three global cities. In order to understand how a child’s “typical” day is constructed in school settings, it is important to place these images within both the local and global sociocultural contexts in Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore. The everyday practices in the classrooms and social interactions in schools are (re)creating new sociocultural conditions for shaping children’s lifeworlds. Through the classroom ethnographic data of children’s lifeworlds in schools, we have explored the complex relations between the sociocultural expectations of what effective official learning is regarded as being, and what counts as desirable learning outcomes in each system. Children’s lifeworlds and childhoods, more generally, are constantly changing as our new social imaginaries are connected with dominant discourses that reshape our everyday practices. In this Global Childhoods project, we have sought to provide

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a fuller portrait of children’s lifeworlds to interject new critical spaces for further interrogations of the dominant discourses as the universal normative way of defining what “successful” learning is for all children. As illustrated in our data (see Fig. 5.1 and Table 5.1), while the intensity of emphasis is on teacher-directed teaching and outcome-based learning for children’s everyday schooling experiences, children’s learning experiences are varied across the three global cities. Further, it is important to reiterate that there are notable shared logics about schooling in the dominant global discourse that includes a construction of children as productive human capital/talents/labourers, with a focus on the future. To conclude, as we reflect on our collected ethnographic data, it is important to note that the world has experienced multiple waves of global pandemic and children’s everyday schooling experiences have been reshaped and changed in a multiplicity of ways. In the field of education, the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have opened up discursive spaces for exploring and rethinking what the everyday practices of teaching and learning might be and how schooling practices can change. Children’s lifeworlds during the pandemic have shifted and changed as school hours of learning and living experiences have been reconfigured. In this way, references to the changes in ways of be(com)ing a student are perhaps central to a deeper understanding about children’s lifeworlds. Their everyday learning and living experiences are a critical part of this conversation and we believe should be regarded as being a central element of what systems consider as being fundamental indicators of success and the factors that are (re)shaping children’s ways of being and becoming. Moving away from a traditional comparative education view, our discussion of what children’s everyday learning looks like in schools across three global cities has not been done to idealise the notion of what constitutes the “best” education practice, or which education system can produce better outcomes. Rather, in this chapter, we assert the importance of (re)conceptualising schools as sociocultural institutions that are formed through sociocultural values in the context of varying dominant political economic systems. With this rationality, our analysis and discussion of the timetables and school as built environments have highlighted the need to problematise what schools and schooling may mean in children’s lifeworlds and to consider how they shape what children do inside the bounds of their schooling experience as part of their broader lifeworld encounters.

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Chapter 6

Everyday Out-of-School Lifeworlds Look Like This: Children’s Activities in Three Global Cities Clare Bartholomaeus , Anita Kit-wa Chan , Nicola Yelland , Nanthini Karthikeyan , and Li Mei Johannah Soo Abstract An exploration of children’s lifeworlds must necessarily go beyond school, to consider children’s everyday out-of-school lives. In this chapter, we focus on the out-of-school activities of Year 4 (9- and 10-year-old) children in the global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore. We draw on survey responses from 627 children to consider their activities on weekdays after school and weekends, as well as their enjoyment of these activities. Leisure activities were most common across the cities, which are likely to be easily accessible to children, along with the academic activity of homework. To provide a closer reflection on children’s lifeworlds, we also explore the out-of-school activities of one child in each city, drawing on data (re)produced as a re-enactment of their Thursday afternoons, and a discussion of their regular activities across a week. We suggest similarities amongst the children’s activities may be partly attributed to shared features of their lives, such as their age and positioning as children, temporality, school attendance, and location in a global city, rather than constituting a universal global childhood. We also reflect on the need to consider diversity amongst children within cities to provide a more complex picture of children’s everyday out-of-school lifeworlds. Keywords Children’s time use · Out-of-school activities · Children’s leisure activities · Homework and tutoring · Video re-enactments · Children’s lifeworlds

C. Bartholomaeus (B) · N. Yelland The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A. K. Chan The Education University of Hong Kong, Ting Kok, Hong Kong N. Karthikeyan Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore, Singapore L. M. J. Soo Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I-F. Lee et al. (eds.), Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities, Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0_6

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In this chapter, we contend that any consideration of children’s everyday lifeworlds must necessarily go beyond school, to consider the role and significance of children’s home, family, and community life (Yelland et al., 2008, 2012). We draw on the broader Global Childhoods project to specifically explore Year 41 (9- and 10-yearold) children’s everyday out-of-school activities in the global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore. We analyse data that was produced in a survey completed by 627 children in the three cities, focusing on questions relating to their participation in, and enjoyment of, activities outside of school. We then focus on exploring one child’s everyday activities and routines outside of school in each city, drawing on data produced using a re-enactment methodology (adapted from e.g. Pink, 2012; Pink & Leder Mackley, 2014). The Global Childhoods project works with the concepts of lifeworlds and everyday lives to explore children’s everyday lifeworlds at school, at home, and in the community (Yelland et al., 2008). In this chapter, we focus on children’s lives outside of school. Our conceptual framing has been inspired by earlier writing about the (singular) lifeworld by Husserl (1970) and Habermas (1987), alongside theories of everyday life as conceptualised by de Certeau (1984, 1997) and Pink (e.g. 2012) (for more details, see Chap. 1).

6.1 Previous Research on Children’s Out-of-School Activities There is a significant body of work on children’s activities outside of school in many countries around the world, including a particular focus on their time use (for a comprehensive overview of this early work, see Larson & Verma, 1999). Some of this literature has provided a consideration of children’s activities across different countries. For example, the Children’s Worlds project conducted by Rees (2017) explored 8-, 10-, and 12-year old children’s activities in 18 diverse countries around the world in the form of housework and caring, learning, social activities with family and friends, and leisure. Rees (2017) found that there was some variation in participation in activities across the countries, but that children were largely satisfied with their time use in all of the countries. Harkness et al.’s (2011) study drawing on time-use diaries completed by parents of young children in six western countries found that 94–98% of children’s waking time was spent on eight key activities: meals, family activities, play, developmental and school-related activities, watching television, personal grooming, travel, and school or preschool. The time allocated to the activities often, but not always, matched with the importance parents placed on them. Other research has shown changes in children’s activities across time, noting, for example, an increase in time at home, screen-based activities, homework, reading, and organised activities, and a decrease in discretionary time, 1

Year 4 is more commonly referred to as Primary 4 in Hong Kong and Singapore. We have used Year 4 in this chapter as this is a more internationally recognised term.

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unstructured play, outdoor activities, and visiting friends at home (e.g. Hofferth, 2009; Mullan, 2019; Nordbakke, 2019). These studies note that these changes link to broader cultural shifts, such as an increased focus on education, changes in technology, and parents’ concerns for children’s safety. In this section, we provide a brief outline of the existing research in our focus locations of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore, concentrating on three overarching areas which appear in the literature, and noting the interplay within these: leisure activities, academic activities, and non-academic organised activities. We note that there is limited literature in Hong Kong and Singapore around children’s out-of-school activities, and there is also little research focusing specifically on Melbourne, although there are several studies in Australia more broadly.

6.1.1 Leisure Activities Research from all three global cities highlights that children participate in a range of leisure activities, which are often screen-based, but can also include reading and other activities. For example, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2019) focusing on Victoria, the state in which Melbourne is located, shows that a large number of parents reported their 5- to 14-year-old children taking part in leisure activities, including screen-based activities (92.0% of children were reported to participate weekly), reading for pleasure (81.5%), and creative activities (e.g. drama, singing) (63.9%). Drawing on a nationally representative sample of children in Australia in The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), Yu and Baxter (2016) focus on screen time activities (television viewing, computer use, and electronic gaming), finding that the time spent on these activities per day was higher at weekends than on weekdays. Across the total days sampled, the LSAC study found that the average daily time spent on screen time activities was 115 min at 8–9 years old and 164 min at 10–11 years old. In Hong Kong, research by Yelland et al. (2012) with Primary 5 students suggests most students reported spending time engaged in leisure activities outside of school, such as watching television, playing computer games, reading comics and books, playing indoor games, and participating in outdoor sports and activities. Yelland et al.’s (2012) survey with the parents of these children similarly found that parents reported their children engaging in a range of leisure activities, such as reading and playing indoor games. Singapore government data from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) on the daily “media activities” of a sample of 318 children ages 7–10 in 2015 suggests that they spent 1.2 h watching MediaCorp TV, 0.7 h watching Pay TV, 0.7 h watching other content, 0.3 h reading books, 0.1 h listening to music, 0.8 h playing video games, and 0.1 h using the internet for social networking (Data.gov.sg, 2016). Other studies in Singapore also suggest that primary school-age children spend time and enjoy reading for leisure (Majid, 2018), particularly English-language books (Sun et al., 2020).

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6.1.2 Academic Activities Academic activities, such as homework and tutoring, are more often a focus of discussions about children in Hong Kong and Singapore (e.g. Tam & Chan, 2011; Tan, 2017, 2019), than in Australia. Tam and Chan’s (2011) study suggests that Hong Kong primary school students spend more than one hour on homework a day. They suggest that parents and students at the primary school level view homework as an important activity, although children would prefer to spend less than an hour on homework a day. Yelland et al. (2012) found that homework was the most common activity reported by Primary 5 students in their Hong Kong survey, with nearly every student participating in homework after school during the week and most at weekends. However, notably, in Yelland et al.’s (2012) survey with these children’s parents, parents reported lower levels of homework participation amongst their children. Tutoring (English, Math, Chinese, Other) and classes in another language were not common activities, according to both students and parents. In contrast, Tan (2019) highlights the significant private tutoring industry in Hong Kong, with large amounts of money spent by parents on children’s participation in tutoring activities, although this is more common at the secondary level. The more expensive one-on-one home tutoring is available to a smaller number of well-off families, compared to the larger group tuition centre businesses available to more families (Tan, 2019). In Singapore, a government study by the IMDA suggests that a sample of 318 children ages 7–10 reported doing 0.4 h of homework a day (Data.gov.sg, 2016). In terms of tutoring, a recent survey in Singapore found that nearly 80% of parents who have children in primary school pay for private tutoring (Davie, 2015). Tan (2017, 2019) argues that tuition is readily available to all parents in Singapore, as in some cases tuition is subsidised or free at self-help groups, religious organisations, and other charities, which differs from locations such as Hong Kong and Australia. The figures Tan (2017, p. 321) quotes suggest that tuition costs 2–3% of the median household work income in Singapore. Parents who are university educated and have high monthly incomes are more likely to spend money on tutoring for their children (Tan, 2017). In contrast, Australian studies suggest fewer primary school-age children participate in homework, with one study focusing on children in Victoria finding that 84.2% of children did homework or other study outside of school in the 12 months prior to the study (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2013). Another study in Australia found that 55% of Year 4 participants reported doing homework “every day or almost every day”, with 10% reporting they “hardly ever or never” did homework (Redmond et al., 2016). Tutoring relating to school subjects in Australia is less common than in Hong Kong or Singapore, but is a growing industry, with racialised discourses around the engagement in tutoring amongst families from East Asian backgrounds (Butler et al., 2017; Dooley et al., 2020). It is also important to note that in Hong Kong and Singapore, tutoring may comprise of both academic tutoring relating to school subjects and non-academic enrichment activities (e.g. sports, artistic pursuits), which are not always clearly distinguished (Tan, 2019). Karsten’s (2015) study with twenty parents of children

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(primarily 4–12 years old) in middle-class families in Hong Kong found that children participated in up to seven different enrichment activities per week with a mean of four activities. Children who were 8–11 years old participated in the highest number of activities, often English or Mandarin language classes, and piano lessons. Karsten (2015) argues that this uptake of enrichment activities which focus on formal learning-related experiences needs to be understood in the current sociocultural context of Hong Kong, where she writes “[t]his generation of parents feels like they have to invent a new childhood in a global and competitive city, one that requires a significant investment of time, energy and money for the development of children’s skills” (2015, p. 567). At the same time, she also argues that “[p]arents hope that children’s enrichment activities create situations of playful learning they themselves had never experienced during their childhood” (Karsten, 2015, p. 567).

6.1.3 Non-academic Organised Activities In contrast to Hong Kong and Singapore, in Australia non-academic organised activities are more likely to be viewed as leisure. Drawing on data from The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), Rioseco et al. (2018) found that approximately 90% of children ages 8–9 and 10–11 participated in at least one extracurricular activity, either provided by their school or an organisation. Sports and art/music/performance were the most common activities, with very few participating in academic classes. They suggest that this participation may be used by parents as a substitute for after school care, and was also impacted by income. Taylor and Fraser’s (2003) Life Chances Study in Melbourne indicated that at ages 11 and 12, children’s participation in activities varied heavily depending on parental income. In particular, children from low-income families were much less likely to be involved in sports, music, and dance lessons. This brief overview of the research literature on the different types of children’s out-of-school activities in Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore provides somewhat of a picture of children’s lifeworlds. However, it also highlights the difficulties with drawing on different studies with different research methodologies and approaches to consider three locations together. The Global Childhoods project allows for an examination of three locations within one study, drawing on the same methods in each city.

6.2 Methodology The Global Childhoods project explores children’s everyday lifeworlds inside and outside of school in Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In order to do this, we draw on a range of methods: a survey completed by children, video re-enactments,

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classroom ethnographies, and a learning dialogues activity completed by children (see Chap. 1). In this chapter, we draw on data produced in the survey and reenactments in order to consider children’s everyday lifeworlds outside of school.

6.2.1 Survey To provide a broad picture of Year 4 children’s lifeworlds in the three global cities, we conducted a survey exploring children’s experiences inside and outside of school (see also Yelland et al., 2021). A total of 627 children participated, 270 (43.1%) from three schools in Hong Kong, 192 (30.6%) from four schools in Melbourne, and 165 (26.3%) from two schools in Singapore. Slightly more boys (324, 51.7%) than girls (303, 48.3%) completed the survey, and the mean age was 9.9 years (standard deviation 0.54). The online survey was conducted in English in Melbourne and Singapore and was translated into Cantonese for use in Hong Kong (translations were checked for accuracy and relevance to the local language context by two members of the research team). The survey was conducted in class time with researchers and teachers present, where we explained the project and survey to students and they were encouraged to ask any questions they had. In this chapter, we focus on children’s responses relating to the activities they took part in outside of school over a week on weekdays and over the weekend from a list of 18 activities. These activities were selected as those children were most likely to participate in from an earlier longer survey in the Millennial Kids Learning project (e.g. Yelland et al., 2012). Children responded on a four-point scale: No time at all (I don’t do the activity); A little bit of time (less than 1 h); Some time (1– 3 h); A lot of time (more than 3 h). In this chapter, we discuss the most and least “common” activities, in order to consider the percentage of children who indicated they undertook the activity for any amount of time. We focus on common activities because we are interested in how many children undertook each activity (rather than focusing our analysis here on the amount of time the children reported spending doing these activities). We also consider the children’s enjoyment of these activities (children responded on a four-point scale: It’s great; It’s okay; I don’t like it; I don’t do it). Further details of the analysis are available in Yelland et al. (2021).

6.2.2 Re-enactments In order to provide a closer exploration of children’s everyday lifeworlds outside of school, we also draw on the innovative video re-enactments methodology initially conceptualised by Pink to research everyday life (e.g. Pink, 2012; Pink & Leder Mackley, 2014). Re-enactments allow for a closer focus on people’s everyday lives by asking participants to recall and “re-enact” their everyday practices in order to allow for reflections about the activities that constitute their everyday routines. Participants

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are usually filmed while they are re-enacting these practices, and the research is cocreated by participants and researchers to (re)present their everyday lives and to also include their reflections on these practices (Pink & Leder Mackley, 2014). As Pink and Leder Mackley write, to research everyday practices: we need to be “in there” and part of the very flow of life that we are researching. Yet simultaneously, we need to order what we find into manageable analytical units so that it will be meaningful in academic literatures—that is, in a representational world where the everyday becomes abstracted into categories for scholarly analysis. (Pink & Leder Mackley, 2014, p. 146)

The adaption of the re-enactments research methodology to understand children’s everyday lives was developed and trialled by Nicola in her earlier research in the Millennial Kids Learning project in 2015. We built on these earlier trial re-enactments for the Global Childhoods project, with a small sample of children taking part in reenactments, drawn from the classes involved in our ethnographies. During our ethnographic research in classrooms, teachers sent home information sheets and consent forms to families they thought may be willing to participate. However, recruitment was difficult as parents seemed reluctant to share their everyday lives in their homes for research purposes. A total of seven children participated in re-enactments (four in Hong Kong, two in Melbourne, and one in Singapore). The particular week day was chosen by the parent(s) in consultation with the researcher(s). The children were already familiar with us from our ethnographies in their classrooms, and we each conducted the re-enactments in our respective cities in the children’s homes with their families; Nicola and Clare in Melbourne, Anita in Hong Kong, and Nanthini in Singapore. As with the survey, the re-enactments were conducted in English in Melbourne and Singapore and Cantonese in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong reenactment recordings were translated into English for sharing within the research team. The re-enactments were approached slightly differently in the different cities due to a combination of adapting to the local context and working with particular individual children and their families. This reflects the flexibility which is a feature of qualitative research (e.g. Holloway & Todres, 2003), including when working with children and young people across locations (e.g. Burningham et al., 2020). We used an activity log template to frame and discuss the child’s full week of activities with them in all three locations, which we audio recorded. Then the child was asked to re-enact what they would “typically” do on that particular weekday after school, which we video recorded or photographed. Sometimes family members who were present (mostly mothers) would add something or children would look to them for a response or to add more details. We spent approximately 60–90 min with each child in total. The process of re-enacting activities for filming was followed in Hong Kong. In Melbourne, the children did not always re-enact each aspect of their day as they became more focused on discussing it with us verbally and engaging in conversations about particular things that they found interesting or had an opinion about. In Singapore, the parents were not comfortable with us video recording the re-enactment as they were concerned about the privacy of their child and therefore

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we followed their request to talk with them and their child and take photographs to denote the sequence of activities. We offer these re-enactments as a complement to the survey data to provide a broader scope of children’s lifeworlds outside of school. The re-enactments produced multiple forms of data—videos, photographs, audio recordings, and activity logs. From this data, we produced edited videos to encapsulate the flows of children’s diverse after-school activities and conversations generated in the re-enactments, to share amongst the research team for further reflection and discussion. We also drew on our conversations with the children and their families to add to and refine the written activity logs completed at the beginning of our visits. For the purposes of this chapter, we created written narratives of the out-of-school lives of these children, in order to provide a textual (re)presentation of their stories of everyday life outside of school, and simplified the activity logs due to space restrictions. Our processes are inspired by Pink’s work which explores and reflects on people’s everyday lives in close detail (e.g. Pink, 2012, 2021; Pink & Leder Mackley, 2014). We draw on these individual re-enactments to provide an example of the out-of-school lifeworld of one child in a global city. Such a close focus on one child as an example, but not a representation, is evident in previous work, such as in The Global School Room series, which includes “a day in the life” of one child per country, inside and outside of school (e.g. Campbell & Sherington, 2007; Postiglione & Tan, 2007), and the international study by Harkness et al. (2011) which asked parents to “describe your child’s day”. Our re-enactments more explicitly focus on children’s own (re)presentations of their everyday lifeworlds outside of school.

6.3 Survey: A Broad Overview of Children’s Out-of-School Activities Our survey of 627 students in Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore allows for a broad consideration of activities that children in these locations participate in outside of school, as reported by the students (see also Yelland et al., 2021). In this section, we outline and reflect on the activities that children in the three cities reported participating in outside of school, both after school and at weekends, along with their enjoyment of these activities. Doing homework was the most common weekday activity outside of school reported in the three cities combined (96% of all children) (see Fig. 6.1), with slightly more children in Hong Kong and Singapore (both 97%) than Melbourne (94%) reporting they undertook this weekday activity, although this was not statistically significant. The next most common weekday activities related largely to leisure: Playing indoors (91%), Reading books (91%), Watching TV (88%), Using a tablet, iPad or smartphone (87%), and Talking and sharing with your parents (86%). The least common weekday activities undertaken by children were primarily organised activities: Tutoring—Language (31% of all children), Tutoring—English (37%),

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Fig. 6.1 Time spent on activities outside of school on weekdays. Note All figures may not add to 100% due to rounding

Tutoring—Mathematics (38%), and Classes for dance/drama/singing/music/art (43%), as well as Being read to by someone else (31%). While tutoring was not a common activity reported by the surveyed children in the three global cities, more children in Hong Kong and Singapore reported tutoring as an out-of-school activity they engaged in, compared to children in Melbourne. Activities at the weekend were similar to weekday activities outside of school, although appeared to involve more activities outside the home and more leisure (see Fig. 6.2). The most common weekend activities in the three cities combined were all likely related to leisure: Playing indoors (91%), Using a tablet, iPad or smartphone (90%), Watching TV (88%), Outdoor sports or activities (85%), and Shopping (84%). Homework appeared ninth in the list of weekend activities (74%), although this varied

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Fig. 6.2 Time spent on activities at weekends

between cities, with children in Singapore (84%) and Hong Kong (82%) more likely than children in Melbourne (54%) to report undertaking homework at the weekend, with these differences being statistically significant. The least common activities at weekends were the same as weekdays outside of school, with slightly different percentages of children for each: Tutoring—Language (27%), Tutoring—English (29%), Being read to by someone else (30%), Tutoring—Mathematics (30%), and Classes for dance/drama/singing/music/art (33%). Activities appeared to be enjoyed by most of the students who undertook them in all three cities (see Fig. 6.3). The most enjoyed activities (“It’s great”) could be considered to be leisure activities: Using a tablet, iPad or smartphone (75%), Going to the movies (74%), and Outdoor sports or activities (70%). Academic activities were disliked the most (“I don’t like it”): Doing homework (41%) and the three tutoring

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Fig. 6.3 Enjoyment of out-of-school activities

activities (approximately a third of children for each tutoring type). However, this means that more than half of the children reported these academic activities as “great” or “okay”. There were few differences between cities in terms of enjoyment. Some notable exceptions related to Visiting friends or relatives, which more children in Melbourne (78%) and Singapore (65%) reported was “great”, compared to a much lower percentage in Hong Kong (47%), and Watching TV, which more children in Hong Kong (61%) and Singapore (68%) reported was “great”, compared to a much smaller percentage in Melbourne (40%). While these differences are relatively large in number, it is difficult to provide a clear explanation for these findings.

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6.3.1 Reflections on Survey As we have shown, the children reported engaging in a large number of activities that may be considered informal, everyday leisure activities or “free time” (e.g. playing indoors, watching television). This finding reflects previous research in the three locations that indicates children participate in a range of leisure activities, such as screen-based activities, reading, and creative activities, as we outlined in the introduction (e.g. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2019; Data.gov.sg, 2016; Yelland et al., 2012). These common activities were those that could be considered easily accessible to children, and part of everyday life. For the most part these were informal, rather than organised, activities, although Outdoor sports or activities also rated highly on the list, particularly at weekends, which likely included some organised sports. As Rees (2017) suggests, relative ease of (economic) access to technology and materials required to engage in these informal leisure activities may partly explain their prevalence, with differences potentially relating to parenting practices and educational expectations. In contrast, organised activities (academic and leisure) were reported less often, despite the frequent discussion of these in the limited existing research about children’s out-of-school lifeworlds in Hong Kong and Singapore (e.g. Karsten, 2015; Tan, 2019). It is also important to note that, in terms of activity participation, there was only one statistically significant difference for gender, and this only occurred in Hong Kong. Girls in Hong Kong were more likely to participate in Classes in dance/drama/singing/music/art than boys on weekdays and weekends. Such a gender difference in enrichment activities is not discussed in other Hong Kong studies (e.g. Karsten, 2015; Tan, 2019). Due to only one significant difference for gender, it appears that participation in the broad categories of activities included in the survey were mostly similar regardless of gender, reflecting several previous studies about children’s activities (e.g. Nordbakke, 2019; Yelland et al., 2012). The survey asked about a broad range of out-of-school activities, relating to leisure activities, academic activities, and non-academic organised activities. This included different academic activities, which, out of all of the activities, overall were the most common in the form of Doing homework and the least common in the form of tutoring activities. As outlined above, homework is an activity undertaken by most children in our three focus locations, although the length of time and frequency may differ. The commonality of homework around the world was also found by Rees (2017) in the Children’s Worlds project, where homework was the most reported daily activity amongst children in 15 of the 18 countries. From this, we suggest that homework is a shared activity for many children in upper primary school around the world in this part of the twenty-first century (i.e. related to age, school attendance, and time period), whereas other activities, such as the specific activities relating to leisure, may be more diverse amongst children within and between locations. While children in Hong Kong and Singapore were more likely to take part in tutoring than children in Melbourne after school and at weekends, tutoring was not undertaken by most of the students in our survey. This provides somewhat of a counter to the literature

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which suggests involvement in tutoring is common amongst primary school students in Singapore and Hong Kong (e.g. Tan, 2019). However, it should be noted that the children in our sample attended a small number of government-funded schools, with varying parental incomes and class-based parenting cultures, which could impact on involvement in tutoring. Another possible explanation may be that previous studies have been more focused on tutoring, whereas our survey aimed to explore a wider range of activities children participated in outside of school. The survey provided a broad view of children’s out-of-school activities. However, the content of what each of these activities may actually entail (e.g. what Playing indoors may include) needs further consideration, alongside a more detailed picture of children’s everyday out-of-school activities. The re-enactments we explore below provide some illustrations of the form of children’s out-of-school lifeworlds for a small number of children.

6.4 Re-enactments: Children’s Thursday Afternoons in Three Global Cities In order to provide a closer look at children’s out-of-school lives, here we explore descriptive narratives focusing on one child in each of the locations relating to their re-enactment after school on a Thursday afternoon, alongside an “activity log” table mapping the general patterns of their week outside of school. As mentioned above, these are not intended to be representative of all children in each of the locations, but instead allow for a closer exploration of children’s everyday lives, as produced in our research (e.g. Spyrou, 2011). For ease of reading, we have used “us” when referring to the researcher(s) conducting the re-enactments. We have also simplified the activity logs for space reasons, and note their value in providing an overview of children’s weeks, although they are most likely to focus on organised or recurring activities which can be more easily recalled. Children are referred to using pseudonyms.

6.4.1 Madison, Melbourne Madison is 9 years old from a white, middle-class family in Melbourne in the state of Victoria in Australia. She lives with her mum, dad, and older brother who attends high school, along with their dog and two cats. Her parents both have flexible work schedules in their professional jobs, and her mum tells us that at least one of them has always been around for their children when school ends. Madison attends a coeducational government primary school in Melbourne, catering for preparatory or “prep” (the first year of school in Victoria, approximately 5 years old) to Year 6 (approximately 11 years old). The school has a long history and now has students from a large range of countries and cultural backgrounds, particularly from countries

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in Asia. Madison has attended this school since “prep”. The school is in walking distance of their family home, a large older house with spacious front and back gardens. Madison’s activity log shows she spends a lot of time with her family and also engages in organised activities several nights after school, mostly for leisure (see Table 6.1). Madison’s school starts at 9:00 am and finishes at 3:30 pm each weekday. On the day of the re-enactment (Thursday), her older brother picks her up from school to walk home, along with her friend from another Year 4 class from school. Madison tells us she usually walks home with either her brother or one of her parents, often her dad. The walk home takes just over 10 min, where we are met by their mum who is waiting for them inside the house. Madison puts her bag away, then has a snack of popcorn and a chat with her mum, brother, and friend in the kitchen/living area. She says that she often has afternoon tea and a chat when she arrives home from school. Usually on Thursdays Madison goes to “Fun Club” at the local library for about an hour, straight after school, where she says she plays on her iPad, talks with her friends, and eats lollies. Rather than going to “Fun Club”, on the day of the re-enactment, her friend, who also lives locally, has come over to practise basketball on some local courts. Madison’s mum tells us that when Madison has free time at home she likes to make things, read, or draw, or sometimes she has friends over. On Thursdays Madison is usually picked up by a parent from “Fun Club” at about 5 pm and they go straight to her brother’s swimming lesson which starts at 5:30 pm and lasts about half an hour. They get home from swimming at about 6:30 pm. Madison advises that she usually has a small amount of homework (Spelling and Mathematics), set by her teacher on Fridays, which is due the following Friday. She usually completes this on Thursdays after they get home from her brother’s swimming lessons and before the family has dinner. Madison does not take part in any tutoring after school, although she did receive some extra help when she started school. Madison says she does not want to undertake tutoring to help her pass the entrance test for the selective high school her brother attends, although her mum has said she will have to if she wants to take the test. Madison eats dinner with her family at around 7 or 7:30 pm on weeknights or, as Madison says “whenever she [mum] gets it ready”. They like to walk their dog before or after dinner. During the week, Madison’s only screen time at home is watching the nightly news with her family, and this is usually followed by a discussion. Madison’s bedtime is between approximately 8:30 and 9:00 pm each night during the week and weekend. She has an established routine which includes brushing her teeth, followed by reading to her parents or her parents reading to her. At 9:00 pm Madison goes to bed and reads by herself, and then goes to sleep at around 9:30 pm.

6.4.2 Mei Mei, Hong Kong Mei Mei is a 9-year-old girl from a working-class family, living in a small flat in a public housing estate with her parents and younger brother. They live in Tung Chung,

Tuesday

8:30/9 pm Bedtime Read

8:30/9 pm Bedtime Read

8:30/9 pm Bedtime Read

8 pm

8:30/9 pm Bedtime Read

Dinner Walk dog 7:30 pm Watch and discuss news

Dinner Walk dog 7:30 pm Watch and discuss news

Dinner Walk dog 7:30 pm Watch and discuss news

7 pm

5:30 pm Brother’s swimming lesson 6:30 pm Homework

Dinner Walk dog 7:30 pm Watch and discuss news

Thursday “Fun Club” at local library

6 pm

Swimming lesson

Guitar lesson

Basketball training

5 pm

Wednesday

Snack/chat

After school care

Snack/chat

Monday

4 pm

3:30 pm

Time

Table 6.1 Madison’s activity log, Melbourne Saturday

8:30/9 pm Bedtime Read

Sunday Leisure time, including screen time

Family activities

12 pm Lunch

8:30/9 pm Bedtime

8:30/9 pm Bedtime

10.30–11.30 am Family time Basketball or family activities (drive or weekend away)

9 am Screen time

7:30 pm Watch and Family dinner and discuss news movies (or Sunday)

Family night, take out dinner Walk dog

Snack/chat 4:30 pm Screen time

Friday

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a new town area in Hong Kong. Her father works long hours and comes home late, usually after the children have gone to bed. He is the one who helps Mei Mei with her English assignments at weekends. Her mother used to be a full-time homemaker, but has taken up part-time work since Mei Mei started in Primary 4. Her working hours are from 9 am to 3:30 pm, and this conveniently fits with the children’s school schedule. She goes to work after sending her son (Mei Mei’s brother) to kindergarten and finishes work before Mei Mei has finished school. Mei Mei’s life outside of school involves free time, which she often spends with her brother, and homework, as well as extra-curricular activities at school and organised activities, such as swimming lessons (see Table 6.2). Mei Mei starts school at 8:40 am each weekday and finishes at 3:40 pm. On Thursdays, the day of the re-enactment, she usually attends the Reading Club, an Extra-Curricular Activity (ECA) organised by the school, for an hour from 3:45 pm to 4:45 pm. This is the only school-based ECA that she has taken. While she enjoys the activity, she tells us that it is her mum who encouraged her to join the Club. Her mum also explains to us that Mei Mei seldom reads books at home and she wants Mei Mei to improve her comprehension by reading more. The regular after-school routine begins for Mei Mei when she walks home from school. Her mum used to pick her up from school and they would walk home together. Since the beginning of this school year, as Mei Mei is in Primary 4, she has been travelling home by herself most of the time. She seems to enjoy it and explains that the journey takes about 10 min and is straightforward, so she feels safe to walk home where her mum will have returned from her part-time work and be there to greet her. On the day of the re-enactment (Thursday), instead of attending the Reading Club, her mother picks Mei Mei up and they walk home together. She has regular routines, such as washing her hands, getting changed, and doing homework, before leaving for a swimming class at a nearby public pool at 6 pm on Thursdays. Arriving home at 4 pm, she puts down her school bag, washes her hands and gets changed immediately. She then takes out her school assignments and starts doing her homework on the small dining table. It usually takes her about 20 min to finish it. She explains that she may have about eight or nine assignments each day, but most of them are just corrections of existing work or simple tasks, which can be easily completed in the Tutorial Class—the last period of the school day scheduled on the timetable to allow students to do their homework in school. Mei Mei also makes use of recess to work on her assignments. She finishes as much homework as possible in school, partly because, as she explains, she does not like playing at school very much, and partly because her mum, a Chinese immigrant, is not familiar with Hong Kong’s school curriculum and thus urges her daughter to seek help from teachers whenever possible. On Thursdays, Mei Mei travels to her swimming class by bus with her mum and will be picked up again at 7 pm. The family will then head home to eat dinner at 7:30 pm. Mei Mei usually has dinner with her mum and brother. After dinner, she has free time with her brother. They usually watch cartoons or English DVDs together; sometimes they also play with toys, building blocks, and ball games (such as ping pong, badminton). Mei Mei sometimes also uses her skipping rope alone in the living

Homework 4:30 pm Free time

Market/playground, ride bicycle (sometimes)

Shower Play with brother

Dinner

Play with brother. (Sometimes revision with mum) 8:30 pm Eat fruit

Chat and play with brother 9:30 pm Bedtime

5 pm

6 pm

7 pm

8 pm

9 pm

Monday

4 pm

3:40 pm

Time

Chat and play with brother 9:30 pm Bedtime

Play with brother. (Sometimes revision with mum) 8:30 pm Eat fruit

Dinner

Play with brother

Homework Shower

3:45–5 pm School activity: Leadership Training

Tuesday

Table 6.2 Mei Mei’s activity log, Hong Kong

Chat and play with brother 9:30 pm Bedtime

Play with brother. (Sometimes revision with mum) 8:30 pm Eat fruit

Dinner

Market/playground, ride bicycle (sometimes)

Homework 4:30 pm Free time

Wednesday 4–8 pm Community-based activity class fortnightly) or same as Mon/Wed

Friday

Chat and play with 9:30/10 pm Bedtime brother 9:30 pm Bedtime

Play with brother. Shower, play with (Sometimes brother revision with mum) 8:30 pm Eat fruit

7:30 pm Dinner

Swimming lesson

Homework

3:45–4:45 pm Extra-Curricular Activity (Reading Club)

Thursday

Social activities and dinner with mum’s friends Shower, play

2–4 pm Brownies

Lunch outside

12 pm Swimming lesson

Play until 11 am

Homework

7/8 am Play with brother, breakfast

Saturday

9:30 pm Bedtime

8:00 pm Shower, play, chat and play with brother

Family shopping, strolling around. (Sometimes visit grandparents)

Family goes out for yum cha

9:30–11:30 am

7/8 am Play with brother, dad helps with assignment

Sunday

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room despite the limited space. If she has a dictation or any test on the next day, she will ask her mum to revise with her. Mei Mei’s bedtime is usually at 9 pm each night. Before going to bed, she eats fruit, brushes her teeth, and chats with her brother, who shares the same bedroom with her. She goes to sleep at 9:30 pm.

6.4.3 Ashley, Singapore Ashley is a 10-year-old Chinese girl in Singapore, whose family might be regarded as being (upper) middle class in terms of socioeconomic status. She lives in condominium housing which has a swimming pool and other facilities such as a gym for the residents. Ashley lives with her parents, her older sister who studies in secondary school and another sister who goes to the same school as Ashley. Her father is a businessman and her mother is a full-time homemaker, which is unusual in Singapore as usually both parents are in paid work. She attends a primary school with a Special Assistance Plan (SAP) Programme which offers several subjects in Mandarin. Schools with SAP programmes predominantly have a Chinese culture and almost all the students belong to the Chinese ethnic group. This is not the most common type of school in Singapore as most schools will have students from the three major ethnic groups which consists of Chinese (the majority), Malays, and Indians. Ashley’s school is close to her house and the bus journey from her house to school takes around 15–20 min. Ashley’s activity log shows she spends time undertaking extra-curricular activities, tuition, and homework, along with playing with her sister, reading, watching television, and playing with gadgets (see Table 6.3). Ashley’s school day starts at 7.30 am and ends at 1.30 pm on each weekday. However, on several days, the school also has other organised programmes such as Co-Curricular Activities which commence after school ends. All the schools in Singapore have a similar school structure for time and activities. Ashley has her Co-Curricular Activity on Tuesdays and Fridays which continue to about 5.30 pm. On the day of the re-enactment, Ashley took the public bus home. She mentioned that since her house is quite close, she is comfortable taking public transport by herself. If her sister, who is in another class, finishes school the same time as her, they travel back home together. However, on the day of the re-enactment, her sister had another event on in school. When Ashley reaches her house at 1.45 pm, her mother is waiting for her inside. As soon as she comes inside, Ashley puts down her backpack and takes a quick shower. Meanwhile, her sister comes back from school. While her sister takes a shower, Ashley helps her mother to set the table for lunch. Both sisters have their lunch at 2 pm. Ashley’s mother cooks their meals on most days. Ashley tells us that she usually reads a book while she is eating her lunch. After her lunch, Ashley goes to her room to read her storybook. She reads storybooks in English, usually for 15 to 30 min depending on her mood. As soon as she finishes reading, she starts doing her school homework and the tuition homework assigned to her on that day. On some days she has little or no homework, so she

Lunch 2:30–4 pm Tuition and school homework

2 pm

Wednesday

7:30 pm Read storybook

Watch TV

Play with gadgets (YouTube, read online) 9:30 pm Bedtime

7 pm

8 pm

9 pm

Watch TV

9:30 pm Bedtime

Play with gadgets (YouTube, read online) 9:30 pm Bedtime

Watch TV

7:30 pm Read storybook

Read storybook 6:30 pm Dinner

Read storybook 6:30 pm Dinner

6 pm

7:30 pm School homework, read storybook

Play card games with sister

Relax/play

5 pm

Practise drums 4:30–5 pm Nap

Lunch 2:30–4 pm Tuition and school homework

1:45 pm Shower

Ballet class

Shower 6:30 pm Dinner

2:30–5:30 pm (approx.) Co-Curricular Activity in school

Tuesday

4 pm

3 pm

Monday

1:45 pm Shower

Time

1:30 pm

Table 6.3 Ashley’s activity log, Singapore Thursday

Play with gadgets (YouTube, read online) 9:30 pm Bedtime

Watch TV

7:30 pm Read storybook

Read storybook 6:30 pm Dinner

Play card games with sister

Practise drums 4:30–5 pm Nap

Lunch 2:30–4 pm Tuition and school homework

1:45 pm Shower

9:30 pm Bedtime

7:30–9 pm Maths tuition

Shower 6:30 pm Dinner

2:30–5:30 pm (approx.) Co-Curricular Activity in school

Friday

Saturday

Reads storybook, watches TV, plays with sister

Spend time with family

School homework and own assessment books

Sunday

Reads storybook, watches TV, plays with sister

Spend time with family

Chinese tuition 1.5 h (teacher comes to the house)

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practises various types of activities in her assessment books. She usually spends around 1 to 2 h on homework. She finishes her school work before she carries on with her tuition work. After she has completed her academic work, Ashley practises her drums. Ashley initially learned piano but decided she wanted to learn how to play the drums due to her interest in them. After she practises her drums for about 30 min, she takes a short nap for 15–30 min. After Ashley wakes up from her nap, she play cards with her sister. They also like to play board games and do jigsaw puzzles together. After the sisters have finished their games, Ashley reads her storybook while her mother prepares dinner. Ashley occasionally helps her mother in the kitchen with the household chores. Ashley and her family have their dinner around 6.30 pm. After dinner, Ashley reads her storybook for about 30 min. At 8 pm, the family watches their favourite show on television, except Fridays when Ashley has mathematics tuition. After the show ends at about 9 pm, Ashley has screen time where she uses a shared iPad to watch videos on YouTube, or does some online reading. At 9.30 pm, Ashley brushes her teeth and goes to sleep.

6.4.4 Reflections on Re-enactments Each of these re-enactment narratives has been used to provide a partial picture of the lives of one child in each location on a Thursday after school. These narratives and documentation of the flows of children’s out-of-school activities show the three children spend time with their families, including their siblings, and engage in both informal and organised activities, providing somewhat of a picture of children’s lifeworlds in time (a particular part of the twenty-first century) and place (the three global cities). Families often have regular routines and/or patterns that help them organise their lives, although there is some flexibility with this. These regular routines relate to Karsten’s (2015) idea of “scheduled lives” for children in Hong Kong, although the children in her study had busier (formal) schedules of activities outside of school than the children in our project. The re-enactments highlight that children have dedicated family and leisure time in between organised external activities. The findings also suggest that “screen time” limits are not unique to one location, and reflect an important aspect of children’s lives in the twenty-first century. This links with the broader international literature which suggests that family rules around “screen time” for children are common, although are implemented and taken up in complex ways (e.g. Chaudron et al., 2018; Shin & Li, 2017; Yu & Baxter, 2016). However, we also note that time limits on other activities, such as reading or homework, were not mentioned. Aside from these screen time limits and homework, the re-enactments suggest that children seem to have some say over the activities they participate in, and they often enjoy these child-chosen activities, as has also been found in other studies (e.g. Bidjerano & Newman, 2010; Griffiths, 2011). The re-enactments also suggest that, at this age and during this historical time period, adults continue to supervise children, or remain nearby most of the time, reflecting other studies suggesting an

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increase in parental supervision of children over time, at least partly due to parents’ fears for children’s safety (e.g. Hofferth, 2009; Mullan, 2019). There might be some exceptions to this adult supervision, such as some students travelling short distances home from school by themselves, or with an older sibling, although a parent or other adult was likely to be waiting at their home or after school activity to meet them. The re-enactments also helped to illustrate some of children’s more mundane, yet important, everyday activities, such as eating, co-attending siblings’ sporting activities, and having a bedtime routine. These re-enactments have provided some illustrations of the form of children’s out-of-school lifeworlds in the three global cities, focusing on their everyday activities and routines.

6.5 Discussion and Conclusions Our exploration of children’s everyday out-of-school lifeworlds in Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore suggest that there are many similarities in the activities and everyday routines of the children living in the three global cities. Drawing on our survey and re-enactment data, the main activities the children often engaged in could be regarded as revolving around the broad themes of leisure activities, academic activities, (non-academic) organised activities, and family activities, as well as eating which was frequently mentioned in the re-enactments. In particular, homework was an activity undertaken by nearly all of the students in the three locations on weekdays (an activity common amongst primary school-age children in many countries, e.g. Rees, 2017). Other common activities were those likely to be leisure activities which are easily accessible to children and part of their everyday lifeworlds, such as playing indoors, watching television, and using screen-based technology. These findings relating to similarities are important to highlight, and can be overlooked in studies with multiple locations, as there is a temptation to look for and focus on differences (e.g. Harkness et al., 2006). We argue that some of the similarities amongst the children’s activities may be attributed to shared features of schooling and childhoods in this part of the twenty-first century. For example, the children were all Year 4 students, primarily 9 or 10 years old, impacting the ways they were positioned and their access to particular activities, as moderated in relation to their local contexts. The construction of childhood as a particular category in time and space, influencing the ways in which children are positioned, has long been argued by those within the (new) sociology of childhood (e.g. James & Prout, 1997), and this conceptualisation continues to impact on the framing of children’s lives (e.g. Baraldi & Rabello De Castro, 2020; Wells, 2015). Relatedly, the children were contemporaries, meaning they were all living in the same time period within the twenty-first century (e.g. MacBlain et al., 2017), albeit in different locations and contexts. This shared temporality may also have contributed to some of the similarities in activities. We also note similarities amongst the children in our project as they all attended school, which helped to create structure for the week and influenced the shape of their out-of-school lives. However, the school/out-of-school

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binary is less clear in Hong Kong and Singapore, where children often participate in extra-curricular or co-curricular activities on some afternoons after school. Children may have different weekly patterns if they are, for example, home schooled in various ways, which occurs in Australia (Jackson & Allan, 2010) and Singapore (Tan, 2020), but is less common in Hong Kong (Riley, 2016). In addition, the children’s locations in global cities can also help to explain some of the similarities, potentially impacting the opportunities for different activities and children’s access to them as they live in dynamic networked cities with movements of population and diverse cultures (Sassen, 2001). While there were shared features amongst children in our project, we do not intend to reduce everything to this level of simplicity, or suggest that there is a universal global childhood, which ignores, for example, the local contexts in which children are situated (Baraldi & Rabello De Castro, 2020; Wells, 2015). Thus, it is also necessary to reflect on some of the nuanced differences we found in the children’s activities across the three cities, potentially pointing to the broader cultural contexts of the cities. Most notably, a similar number of children in all three locations reported they did homework during the week, and most did not undertake tutoring activities. However, more students in Singapore and Hong Kong spent time on homework at weekends and they were also more likely to undertake tutoring activities than children in Melbourne. These differences need to be viewed in the context of the educational environments in Hong Kong and Singapore, where there is significant pressure on students to perform academically (e.g. Cho & Chan, 2020; Tan, 2019). As Karsten argues, and we noted earlier in the chapter, within the current sociocultural context of Hong Kong, middle-class parents often enrol their children in a large number of enrichment activities in order to develop their skills, “invent[ing] a new childhood in a global and competitive city” (2015, p. 567), and shaping their out-of-school lifeworlds. It is also important to consider similarities and differences within the cities, and the ways in which particular children may share similar experiences across cities. Our re-enactments hint at potential differences relating to class, such as access to types of tutoring and organised activities, but our data does not enable us to consider this in greater depth. However, others have written about the impact of parental income and education on children’s involvement in particular activities in as much as they might prohibit or enable certain types of activity (e.g. Redmond et al., 2016; Taylor & Fraser, 2003; Yu & Baxter, 2016). For instance, Lareau (2011) has argued that class-based parenting cultures impact more than finances, where middle-class parents’ “concerted cultivation” means children are involved in a range of organised activities, such as tutoring, sports, music lessons, and club activities (see also Karsten, 2015). However, this is contested, with others suggesting that both middleand working-class parents value organised activities, with finances impacting on access and involvement (e.g. Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2014). Others have also shown the need to consider the ways in which ethnicity and culture within locations can impact on children’s everyday lives, and the vast complexities of this. For example, Watkins and Noble (2013) explore the ways in which children from Chinese, Pasifika, and Anglo backgrounds in Australia have varied dispositions to

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learning which is influenced in complex ways by their broader sociocultural backgrounds and cultural practices (Watkins & Noble, 2013). The interplay between different socio-demographic aspects (e.g. class, ethnicity, gender, age, and ability) also work together to shape children’s everyday lifeworlds in varied ways. Children’s activities within each city may also be impacted by socioeconomic and sociocultural contexts and factors beyond the traditional socio-demographic aspects which are often focused on, again creating similarities between cities and differences within them. For example, not all children live with their parents or families, and may live in out-of-home care (e.g. Australian Institute of Health & Welfare, 2022). Another example is that some children may spend significant amounts of time with adults who are not their parents, such as domestic workers in Hong Kong (e.g. Yelland et al., 2013), or with educators in formal out-of-school care settings in Australia (e.g. Rioseco et al., 2018), which can impact on family activities in particular. Crossborder students may spend significant amounts of time travelling to and from school, impacting their out-of-school activities (e.g. Chan & Ngan, 2018). These are just a few examples of the myriad of influences which come together in different ways to impact on children’s everyday lifeworlds, including in relation to their activities outside of school. Further recognition of this diversity, and the ways in which this may play out in each location and impact on children’s activities, is needed. In this chapter, we have highlighted the broad range of activities that children in the global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore engage in outside of school, primarily centring on leisure activities, academic activities, (non-academic) organised activities, and family activities. The survey provided a general picture of children’s activities outside of school, while the re-enactments provided more detailed narratives of individual children’s out-of-school lives, as they were (re)produced in the research. We suggest that our findings indicate many broad similarities between children’s out-of-school activities in the three locations, in part related to the shared features of their lives, such as their age and positioning as children, temporality, school attendance, and location in a global city, rather than constituting a universal global childhood. The contexts of the locations, and the similarities and differences in children’s out-of-school activities within and between locations, highlight the need for more complex thinking about children’s everyday out-of-school lifeworlds. Acknowledgements This work was financially supported by the Australian Research Council: Grant Number DP180100325. The research was supported by the Department of Education and Training, Victoria. We would like to thank and acknowledge Dr Sandy Muspratt for his work on the statistical analyses of the survey data, Christine Chan and Dr Chao-Ling Tseng for their work translating the information sheets, consent forms, and survey questions from English to Cantonese, and Tevin Shuhan Fang for her work translating the re-enactment recordings from Cantonese to English and creating the edited videos in Hong Kong. We also thank the students, school staff, and parents/guardians for their support of the project.

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Chapter 7

Picturing Educational and Future Success Sue Saltmarsh , I-Fang Lee , and Nicola Yelland

Abstract This chapter explicates the ways that written and visual texts are circulating inside and outside the domains of education field to contour the formations of policy, practice and everyday life in shaping the popular construction of educational and future success. Taking a critical perspective to investigate the taken-forgranted construction of success, this chapter highlights and selects educational policies, curriculum and syllabus examples from education department websites from each of the three global cities where the study was conducted. Foregrounding the ways that policy intersects with perceived individual, family and community aspirations on behalf of children, we expand our discussion by bringing in discussion of popular images, advertisements and discourses concerned with education and success. We contend that business and in particular, edu-business, also harness these ideas to promote particular orientations to, and opportunities for, participation in learning experiences designed to maximise selected perceived sociocultural imaginations as the potential for children’s successful and promising futures. Additionally, our qualitative data from children’s learning dialogues in which they responded with both written comments and illustrations, to four prompts, provides particularly interesting insights into the ways that children themselves make use of the visual modality to construct and express their own versions of what is valued about their everyday learning, and of what goals and visions of future success animate their ideas about school as well as aspirations of their own futures. Together with these examples, we

S. Saltmarsh (B) Department of Early Childhood Education, Education University of Hong Kong, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] I-F. Lee School of Education, University of Newcastle Australia, Ourimbah, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] N. Yelland Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I-F. Lee et al. (eds.), Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities, Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0_7

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contend, function in the production of policy cultures in which orientations to educational and future success are taken up, re/produced and contested in the everyday lifeworlds of children. Keywords Policy · Curriculum · Educational success · Visual images Throughout the Global Childhoods project, we have considered how education—as it is represented, imagined, embodied and enacted—intersects with multiple contexts and facets of children’s lifeworlds. Children’s learning is not narrowly confined within the context of schools and their lifeworlds are intersecting with local and global circulations of ideas and sociocultural practices. To investigate what educational success may entail across the three global cities in this study, visual images such as pictures and illustrations that are displayed in educational websites, policy and curriculum documents, or popular websites of the edu-businesses are treated as significant symbolic visual representations leading and shaping dominant sociocultural constructions about “success”. For instance, Chapter 2 showed how being “out and about” in global cities means, at least in part, to encounter images in a wide variety of public spaces. From bus and railway stations, to shopping centres, schools, parks, playgrounds, galleries and museums, public spaces are “awash” with images of children and families engaged in a wide range of activities that embody familiar sociocultural meanings of “success” in everyday life and its relationship with learning. While many of these may be glimpsed in passing, others may bring holidays, exhibitions, movies and other popular culture events and activities to the attention of observant passers-by. It is important to note that even though these visuals and images of the edu-business advertisements in the public spaces may offer useful information about school and afterschool programmes or private tutoring enrolments, these images are part of a larger circulation of competitive educational discourses that promote selected sociocultural and educational preferences based on what they purport to offer prospective students (and their families) in terms of educational environments and potential future success. Providing another example of critical analysis and discussion, Chapter 4 also focused on visual images to make connections between education policy and curriculum documents, and the ways that visual texts—typically those on official education department websites—frame reform agendas, curriculum content and pedagogical approaches in ways construct the idealised learner-citizens imagined by bureaucrats and policymakers. Chapters 5 and 6 further illustrated sociocultural constructions of successful schooling and education, going beyond stereotypical ways of understanding what learning and everyday life “look like” in the three global cities. Specifically, we drew on observational and visual data collected in children’s classrooms and homes to provide a more holistic perspective to enhance the ways we understand the multiple dimensions of children’s lifeworlds. In this chapter, as we focus on destabilising the construction of “educational success” in the three global cities. In doing so, we begin with a theoretical discussion to elucidate how we “see” the texts and everyday visual images as an important means

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by which societies construct and circulate shared understandings and cultural imaginaries of idealised childhoods and educational success. While recognising that visual images, like any text, are always partial and open to multiple socio-political readings and cultural interpretations, nesting within critical onto-epistemological perspectives, we conceptualise visual texts as effective modalities for communicating ideas about social life and one’s place within it. We understand education as an important part of this connection with learning and learning-related activities being a regular feature of public images depicting children in various scenarios. Following the theoretical discussion, we juxtapose and select several examples from official education department websites from each location. In this section of the discussion, we focus on how “educational success” is presented in the policy domain by investigating the official educational websites to highlight the ways in which policy texts and images intersect with perceived individual, family and community aspirations on behalf of children. Taking our critical analysis and discussion of official education construction(s) of success to the next layer, we extend our focus to review everyday visual images concerned with popular sociocultural representations about education and schooling. In these, we are interested in the ways in which “success” is depicted in or perpetuated through these visual representations across multiple public websites of educational business. We explore how the sector of edu-business has focused on certain types of ideas through selected visual representations to promote particular orientations to, and opportunities for, creating learning experiences that are designed to maximise and promote children’s potential for educational success and promising futures. Then we continue our discussion by drawing on the collected data from children in the Global Childhoods project with learning dialogues designed to act as provocations about their engagement with schooling and their aspirations for their future. These responses, as both written and visual texts, provide an opportunity to gain insights into the ways that children themselves make use of written and visual modalities to construct their personal versions of what is valued about their everyday learning, and of what goals and visions for their future success animate their ideas about school. Together these examples, as analysed and discussed in the following sections, function in the production of policy cultures in which orientations to educational and future success are prescribed, re/produced and contested in the everyday lifeworlds of children. We contend that these types of visual representations are effective in accompanying the written texts to mobilise as well as to normalise and to account for the notion of success.

7.1 The Making of Success in Educational Landscapes: Theorising Visual Representations About Success Education functions as a key technology not only for meritocratic forms of social governance and cultural administration, but also as a signifier of individual success and personal freedom. Within the field of education, the formation of dominant

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educational discourses is multi-layered and nested within the broader scope of local and global circulations of influential narratives about what’s deemed as progress, better development and success. Accordingly, in sociocultural and political economic narratives about success, the omnipresence of visual representations of success has worked to shape and shift our everyday practices with the hope for be(com)ing successful. The power of any visual image lies in its capacity for open readings and multiple sociocultural interpretations. As the old saying goes: a picture says more than ten thousand words. The photos or illustrations that accompany written texts in many public displays tend to construct “success” in ways that are recognisable within both local cultural contexts and that also reflect transnational educational values. Rizvi and Lingard (2010) have argued, the dominant neoliberal social imaginary under globalisation has re-shaped not only education reforms, policies and systems, but educational values: this imaginary has redefined educational values in largely economic terms, linked to the concerns of social efficiency. It has emphasized the importance of market dynamics in the organization of education around a view of education as a private good. It has linked the purposes of education to the requirements of the global economy. (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010, p. 91)

The neoliberal social imaginary is necessarily implicated in the educationally related activities of those have been regarded as citizen-consumers (Axford & Seddon, 2006; Giroux, 1999; Peters, 2012), whose self-fashioning is accomplished in part through educational consumption. Education becomes a means of exercising agency, managing risk and maximising opportunities for oneself and one’s family in order to conduct life “as a kind of enterprise, seeking to enhance and capitalize on existence itself through calculated acts and investments” (Rose, 1999, p. 164). Learning is thus reconfigured as a marketable product or a commodity that signifies good consumer choices, a smart investment in children’s futures and a guarantee of affluence and social mobility. Accordingly, these sociocultural phenomenon and conditions, private goals, personal desires and family values intersect with and are harnessed towards the achievement of public objectives through which a normative picturing of “success” is produced and perpetuated though education. While an extensive consideration of the globalisation of education is not the main scope of discussion in this chapter, it is important to note the pervasiveness of neoliberal ideologies that privilege notions of choice, competition and what Nikolas Rose (1999) refers to as the “responsibilisation” of individuals and families. These are significant shaping forces within the educational landscapes across the three global cities in which a dominant and normative notion of “success” is constructed. Positioning this work within a critical epistemological understanding, we conceptualise public images as being part of a local and broader, transnational contouring of “education landscapes”, consisting of “the extensive range of policy-related, pedagogic and promotional sites associated with educational provision, participation and purchase” (Saltmarsh, 2011, p. 26). We situate our theoretical discussion and the research focus of the Global Childhoods project within these educational landscapes against the backdrop of the global knowledge economy, in which education has

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come to the fore as a primary means of maximising the competitiveness of national economies on the world stage (Kenway et al., 2006; Lingard et al., 2016; Ozga & Lingard, 2007; Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). In our conceptual framework, understandings about education landscapes are an important requisite to any critical consideration of learning’s place in that the public visual images of and about learning work to demonstrate what Sarah Pink (2021) has denoted as “forms part of human imaginations and conversations” (p. 51). Building on Pink’s theoretical and methodological conception of visual ethnography to explore social worlds and human practices, we use the phrase “the appearance of learning” to interrogate how educational consumption is constructed in visual images in the public domain as synonymous with learning. The appearance of learning, in our use of the term, is represented in and through what Rose (1999) refers to as “the public habitat of images” (p. 86) as a marketable product, and as a means of social and economic positioning. Additionally, our investigation of the “appearance of learning” in the three global cities interrogated how public images are connecting childhood and education to convey multiple layers of sociocultural meanings. We hold the public displays of images as examples of consumption technologies that furnish “a plurality of pedagogies for living a life that is both pleasurable and respectable, both personally unique and socially normal” (Rose, 1999, p. 86). Thus, while the Global Childhoods project is fundamentally concerned with children’s everyday learning and living in the three global cities, it is important to consider what everyday images on public display across different domains such as official education department websites or popular educational-related websites including the private sector of shadow education might contribute to social imaginaries of childhood as a time of being and becoming citizen-consumers of education. By locating our analysis within these broader educational landscapes, we also signal our recognition of the spatial and relational aspects of visual images on public display in global cities. Both formal education and informal learning-related activities represent and normalise learning and educational aspirations as being necessary and desirable features of childhood experiences. To further understand how educational success has been constructed, we explore examples of learning as they feature in images of children that are displayed in our global city sites, and then explore images produced by the children who participated in the research data collection when we asked them to complete the learning dialogues described in Chapter 1. We argue that in everyday visual images and texts produced for public consumption, portray idealised visions of success, via the education of the child, and functions as a signifier of compliant, selective and consuming citizen-consumers responsible for contributing to national and transnational futures within the cultural and economic flows of global capitalism. However, as highlighted from children’s own illustrations in their learning dialogues, we also contend that children themselves also exercise agency and voice, and at adopt dominant discourses of learning and future success on some occasions while at other times create counter-narratives and imaginaries of their own.

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7.2 Picturing Education and Success in the Policy Domain Education as a pathway to successful futures is implicit in many of the policy and curriculum documents that are currently available in the three global cities of the Global Childhoods project. Success may or may not be mentioned explicitly, but the language of education policy and practice—eduspeak (Kelly, 2003)—does considerable discursive work to reassure stakeholders that it is through the perceived quality and formulated content of curriculum, policy ideals and children’s own individual learning and achievements that the children of today are being prepared to succeed in the future. For instance, as the Australian Curriculum, Assessment & Reporting Authority (ACARA) stipulate on their Australian F-10 curriculum webpage in the educational context of Australia: The Australian Curriculum is designed to help all young Australians to become successful learners, confident and creative individuals, and active and informed citizens. (ACARA, n.d., https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/)

Accompanying the written texts of ACARA, are the visual images presented on the webpage banner across the top of the reflects a central contextual theme about what “successful” learning for “successful” learners should look like. The pictorial representation about “success” through the photographs of children as learners depicts the children in school uniforms as being focused, engaged and clearly enjoyed the school activities in which they are participating (see this link to ACARA website for the image https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/). Accompanying the neoliberal language of achievement standards, outcomes and effectiveness, management, throughout the curriculum documents, the visual description about children’s valuable learning, active educational participation and success are uniformly represented visually as positive, enjoyable experiences in Australian schools. As Kelly (2003) observes, the ways in which policy is represented are profoundly ideological, employing numerous strategies for discursive control in ways that influence public understanding and sentiment. Among these policy contextual articulations about successful learning throughout the Australian Curriculum documents, the visual images reflect the way that the sociopolitical language is used, with familiar terms being hijacked, misused, or ill-defined, as well as strategies such as “the rhetorical device of expressing the favoured ideology of buzzwords, in words that have pleasant connotations” (Kelly, 2003, p. 6). In policy documents and public websites, visual images of happy children have not only portrayed happiness but also reenforced happiness as being an essential component of success. While it is nearly impossible to argue against the importance of having happy learners in our education systems across different sociocultural contexts, we content that this popular and nearly universal representation of “happiness” in contemporary images of children as learners is not bias free. This is particularly important, given the primacy of the happiness discourse in relation to children and childhood within the context of learning to perpetuate a “normal and normative” way of being and becoming (Saltmarsh & Lee, 2021; Stearns, 2019). In this way, we view images that depict happiness and

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happy students provide a good provocation of what each geopolitical location values as being a main source of success for futures. Convincing the public to enthusiastically embrace any education policy pertaining to children relies in part on reassurance that children will be affected positively, and that they will be happy about the policy conditions. Another example is the Schoolbag website produced by the Ministry of Education in Singapore to showcase ongoing successful learning stories and educational news that reflect the government’s policy initiatives. A first look into the appearance of learning, at the forefront of the homepage, is a full collection of visual representations of successful learning and learners across the education system in Singapore (see https://www.schoolbag. edu.sg/home). Particularly, within the section of “Photo Gallery on the webpage”, a large collection of photos and news of children’s learning in schools, including effective pedagogical practices, successful learning stories and desired educational achievements, provides a glimpse to how success is pictured in Singapore. These photos of and about children’s learning home in on how success is socioculturally constructed and imagined through educational policies. In the page of a story relating to developing primary schoolchildren’s reading habits, the collection of ten photos comes together to assemblage an overall picture of active learners becoming engaging readers (see https://www.schoolbag.edu.sg/story/encouraging-kids-to-read-at-st-ste phen’s-school). Throughout the Photo Gallery in the Schoolbag website, photos are selected, and the news component is frequently updated to feature successful learning stories provided by the Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) in which children are posing with eager, smiling and happy faces as successful learners. Commonly portrayed in the domains of policy, the visual representations of children are shown smiling contentedly while engrossed in individual learning activities, and more often children are photographed with broad smiles and beaming faces while engaged in learning activities in the company of peers, parents or teachers. Expanding our discussion of the visual images in policy domains by drawing on Deleuze’s (1992) iteration of “the societies of control”, the visual images and representations of success or successful learning can be conceptualised as one of the socio-technological mechanisms of control in education systems through which all students, teachers and parents are being connected with the larger corporation of schools as everyone becomes a stakeholder, and responsible for his/her own pursuit towards be(com)ing successful. We see this at work in all three of the policy contexts from the three global cities in this study. While some curriculum documents and departmental websites rely more heavily than others on photographs, diagrams, illustrations and other visual texts, a common but implicit logic in these visual materials is the way they feature children as a key group of stakeholders in their own successful futures. In doing so, parents and teachers are responsible to take on more of the “shares of stakes” in supporting and engaging their students/children in productive ways of learning as depicted in the policies through which success has been visually represented and prescribed. Therefore, these texts included on the government educational websites, including both written and visual texts, become direct codes/modes to address parents and teachers and encourage and contour them as stakeholders concerning children’s successful futures. What’s at work here is a

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making of a new educational corporation that’s underscoring how the involvement of parents in children’s education has in recent decades been steadily “reconfigured as a means of mobilising parental desires to secure competitive advantage” (Barr et al., 2012, p. 304). Alongside these desires for success, however, it is also emphasised that the parental interest in children’s happiness is a primary concern—a point to which the “utopian policy promise” (Saltmarsh, 2015, p. 51) linking parental care and concern with children’s happiness so powerfully speaks to. While there is no explicit mentioning of happiness in many governments’ educational websites within the policy domains—visual representations of children’s enjoyment in learning, implicit linkages between achievement, happiness and success are manifested in the public websites/cyberspaces. The images function as highly effective visual metaphors for education and curriculum policy effects, thereby performing the discursive work of reassuring parents of their children’s happiness as they are being prepared “for tomorrow’s success”. This discursive linking of education policy to children’s happiness and successful futures represents a salient example of the kind of “pleasant connotations” identified by Kelly (2003) as discursive techniques used by policymakers to construct alignment to particular agendas. Who, after all, would prefer to see images of unhappy children, or ask, what kind of democratic policy would prefer that children be unhappy or unsuccessful in their schooling and future endeavours? As Sara Ahmed points out, “the desire for children’s happiness is … far from indifferent” (2010, p. 93) and is instead discursively inscribed as a “happiness duty” to which children and adults alike are obligated. The happy and successful child is a utopian vision, a cultural imaginary deployed by policymakers to simultaneously remind and reassure parents of their duty to happiness, hence their obligation to support the policy that promises to deliver it. As a normative discourse, “the happiness of childhood functions as a symbolic barometer for optimism/pessimism about the future for the individual child, for the nation state and for society more broadly” (Chapman & Saltmarsh, 2013, p. 62). Through the visual images included in the government educational websites, picturing educational success in the policy domain embodies and reflects layers of ideological and subjective works about the better future for all. The “official” articulation and circulation of success in the policy domains has worked to create a sociopolitical logic through which a new social administration formula is at work by linking children’s educational success with the notion of happiness while locating parents, teachers and children as stakeholders for looking after their successful futures. The visual images, as pictures and open for logical interpretations, not only have casted a mutually beneficial endeavour but also constructed a utopian vision centred on children’s happiness as a non-negotiable given.

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7.3 The Appearance of Learning in Public Domains In the Global Childhoods project, one of our initial interests was the ways in which education is featured in the “public habitat of images” (Rose, 1999, p. 86). While it is common to encounter public displays of edu-business advertisements that are “selling” multiple types of educationally related “services”, we were provoked by the images in many posters and advertisements we viewed as we went out and about on typical daily activities passing by bus and train stations, shopfronts, for example, while we were in Hong Kong for a series of research activities and meetings during 2012–2019. The prevalence of English tutoring programmes and the growing market of English language learning materials that are targeted to children and their families has generated “big” business opportunities across Asia. These advertisements in the form of posters in public spaces, short commercials on TV and/or radio, or the streaming of images through pop-up windows on web pages, have been used as an effective and strategic marketing practice by various transnational publishing houses and companies. For instance, when reflecting on the ways that the images work in promoting what successful learning may entail or look like, by browsing through the advertisements and the visual texts that are designed to promote or “sell” education programmes, learning services and products by iconic transnational academic institutions such as Cambridge English or Oxford University Press (for some examples of the visual texts, see https://www.britishcouncil.hk/en/exam/cambridge), it is important to place them within the familiar tropes in the global education landscape. For example, in a photograph promoting English an exam preparation courses, the slogan of “Maximise your child’s success with the internationally recognize examinations Cambridge English” (British Council, n.d., https://www.britishcouncil.hk/ en/english/courses-kindergarten/cambridge-exam-preparation) is positioned within the larger education landscape in which learning a specific language at a younger age, or mastering English at a higher proficiency level is viewed as constituting a significant step towards success. Another provocation about visual representations of success is linked with a common construction of the growing and developing child with characteristic of “stages” in the pathway towards educational success from early childhood to university (Oxford Parents Club Hong Kong, 2015). This type of image presents a smiling and happy young child awaiting to “measure up” to the projected and imagined future success, through a pre-mapped academic pathway of learning that is common but provocative. The image can be seen as part of a discourse of normalisation, in which childhood development and growth is tacitly made contingent on parental “buying into” (literally and figuratively) commercial educational products and services promising exam success as an indicator children’s future success. Therefore, supporting the child’s learning throughout different stages of achievement, as represented by this iconic transnational publishing press, is constructed as a worthwhile goal that leads the child/family/parent towards ultimate educational success. Romanticising childhood also plays its part in the image, in the form of a smiling and

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happy child. While the child’s innocence of the world of textbooks and exams represented by their position with their back to the growth chart on the wall behind, their pleasure in their own growth nonetheless signifies awareness of their own growing accomplishment. The advertisement simultaneously calls upon and seeks to perpetuate childhood as a stage for parental planning related to obtaining English language skills as a “must-have” for being regarded as “smart” and thus a wise decision is made in choosing to enrol their children in this private learning programme. In this sense, one of the world’s leading academic and education publishing houses—an edu-business par excellence—offers its wares to consumers on the premise that the future success of children in the global marketplace is uncertain and yet potentially secured through the consumption of its products. By combining these notions of both romantic sentimentality and global futures, the appearance of learning appropriates and addresses tensions within the single frame of the image, such that: Childhood can be regarded as a symbol of hope and possibility. The child is and the child can because the child offers the possibility of turning one’s back on the world. Or, in other words, the child as a metaphor for “Everything can be different.” (Vanobbergen, 2004, p. 174)

Images of childhood and learning in public spaces are ubiquitous. Across the three global cities of Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore, advertisements for education represented by various types of “additional” afterschool learning in the form of extra curricula activities are becoming a key feature as we pass through public spaces as well as when we are browsing on mobile devices and via our computer screens. Transnational giant educational companies and leading local edu-businesses are forming another familiar trope in the education landscape—the meritocratic belief that effort equals reward. Meritocracy has long been critiqued as a neoliberal technique, or technology, of biopolitical governance (see Rose, 1999) that manages both individuals and larger populations by drawing on, and exploiting, desires for advantage and success in competitive societies and systems. For Vintimilla (2014), neoliberalism needs to be understood beyond notions of policies grounded in economic principles and can be seen “as a rationality, one which expands its normative ideology and values to other spheres of our lives through specific discourses and practices” (p. 80). Meritocracy is a subjectivating discourse, in other words, it is located within the fabric of how children are educated not only for achievement and success, but for a particular type of subjectivity whose discursive recognisability relies upon “a contingent citizenship based on meritocracy. It compels ordinary citizens to increase their brainpower as a condition of more secure attachment to the metropolitan motherland” (Ong, 2007, p. 92). There are familiar neoliberal traces of sociocultural logic in these images that are shared experiences that resonate with children and their families who live in the three global cities as they navigate the educational systems. When considered together, we see these images of the “appearance of learning” and success as connecting locally situated cultures of childhood and learning with globally recognisable educational, aspirational and consumer ideals. The education landscape is

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replete with global and local contours, within which the research team has been situated as we moved in, and across borders and boundaries in the region, and endeavour to collectively navigate its meaning-making practices in the world’s global cities.

7.4 Children Picturing Learning and Future Success As stated in the introductory Chapter 1, the children who participated in the Global Childhoods project in the three global cities contributed to the generation of data. These children were asked to complete “learning dialogues” as an in-class activity on Monday and Friday of one week of their Year 4 school year. The prompts were: Monday morning: 1. What are you looking forward to at school this week? 2. How do you feel you are going at school? Friday morning: 1. What did you learn at school this week? Was it hard to learn or easy to learn? And did you enjoy it? 2. What job do you want to do when you leave school? The “learning dialogues” activity involved children in responding to these prompt questions with the options to write and/or draw their responses. Some children wrote detailed responses, while others gave only brief replies. Similarly, some children provided elaborate drawings and diagrams in their responses to their own learning and imagined futures while others did not. Across the learning dialogues data in all three cities, there were, of course, variations in the ways in which the children felt and depicted aspects of their learning and how they imagined their futures. In the collection of the children’s responses, we have noted that children who reported the strongest feelings—both positive and negative—about what they were doing at school and how they felt about their own progress, tended to provide the more animated accounts through their drawings/illustrations in the learning dialogues. Similarly, those with clearly articulated visions about their futures tended to produce more detailed rationales and more elaborate drawings and diagrams. Seeking to provide a fuller understanding of children’s own expressions and views about their own learning and aspiration for their education, in this section of discussion, we highlight some samples of the learning dialogues from the three global cities. For most of the children in our study, learning was presented positively—as something unproblematic, enjoyable and fun. For example, in response to the question, “What are you looking forward to at school this week?”, one child in the Melbourne study wrote about learning (see Fig. 7.1). The caption underneath the child’s self-created coloured lettering provides a rationale for looking forward to learning, as something that is acquired in the form of new information and then becomes a permanent feature of who you are. In another

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Fig. 7.1 Learning dialogue, Melbourne

response to this question from a child in Hong Kong, multiple pictures about the learning self as being active and agentive are provided, one in which the student looks to be relaxed and enjoying a range of learning activities (see Fig. 7.2). Interestingly, a number of children in all three global cities made comments about subjects they found difficult or challenging as being something that they looked forward to, and even enjoyed. Feelings about how well, or otherwise, they were doing at school did not necessarily reflect whether or not they reported enjoying school, and many provided examples of circumstances, such as having friends to play with, and activities that they enjoyed, as being an indication of their positive feelings about school. Of particular note, with those who completed illustrations, typically depicting themselves, their friends and peers as smiling. Some children also discussed their feelings about they felt their performance at school with images of play (see Figs. 7.3 and 7.4). These two students’ learning is reflected via activities that they felt happy about, and the detail of the dinosaur skeleton indicates that it involves drawing, writing and learning about topics of interest to the student. Even children who reported feeling less enthusiastic about school tended to draw at least some smiling faces. In one example from Singapore, a child reported feeling “ok” about school, and drew several emoji icons to represent his feelings, with one smiling face included (see Fig. 7.5). The “duty to happiness” (Ahmed, 2010) is apparent to children, such that the appearance of learning routinely obliges the appearance of happiness in the form of

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Fig. 7.2 Learning dialogue, Hong Kong

Fig. 7.3 Learning dialogue, Singapore

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Fig. 7.4 Learning dialogue, Singapore

Fig. 7.5 Learning dialogues, Singapore

smiles. Happiness was also depicted by some children in response to their placement in the school’s performance data. In Fig. 7.6 from Hong Kong, the student’s feelings about how they are doing at school are described in terms of their rankings from year to year: This child’s reiteration of rankings in relation to his/her classmates’ academic performance, and the emphasis on improvement from one year to the next illustrates how, as Kelly (2003) argues, the language and rhetorics of eduspeak have an important discursive function in producing how we understand, speak and think about learning and education. The image in Fig. 7.7 is not one that depicts a child slavishly

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Fig. 7.6 Learning dialogues, Hong Kong

Fig. 7.7 Learning dialogue, Singapore

huddled over books and computers, looking tense, stressed, or angry, but rather it is the face of a child who pictures themselves radiating happiness and revelling in his accomplishments.

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Fig. 7.8 Learning dialogue, Melbourne

Indeed, the discourse of success and its connection to happiness can be a powerful motivator. Some children in the research study also pictured their future employment goals in terms of their already achieved successes, illustrating the extent to which neoliberal ideals of effort, competition and reward are recognised and reiterated in their visions for their own futures. For example, a student from Singapore drew her imagined future as singer or a piano teacher. The student’s musical accomplishments—which are significant for a child in Year 4—are no doubt the result of many hours, and probably a number of years spent in attending lessons, practicing and performing. The success of these activities might be measured in terms of competitions and awards, but the student’s participation in these activities is encapsulated as something she reports as enjoying “very much”. Another example, as demonstrated in Fig. 7.8, is a boy from Melbourne who links his future career aspiration with the “hope” and his “goal” for money that he will give to his family. There are of course gender dimensions to the ways in which children depict their imagined futures—only boys, for example, indicated a desire to work in the police and military. On the whole, girls were more inclined to draw themselves enjoying a wider variety of activities, and a greater variety of career options. One girl in Hong Kong, for example, perfectly encapsulates the discourse of the woman who can “have it all”—career, success and family (see Fig. 7.9).

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Fig. 7.9 Learning dialogue, Hong Kong

In the vast majority of children’s drawings that formed part of the learning dialogues, happiness is depicted as a state of being that is sometimes brought about by participating in subjects and learning tasks that are regarded as being difficult and challenging for students. Sometimes this is manifested in depictions and written comments which illustrate that they are enjoying playing and interacting with peers, and sometimes it is evident in their reference to gaining the recognition that comes with striving to achieve, tracking one’s progress and gaining recognition through competitively attained rewards. In their drawings, we see the ways that discourses of educational success and its companion, the “promise of happiness” (Ahmed, 2010), pervade not only everyday images in the public domain and in policy contexts, but in the lived experiences and aspirations of children around the world.

7.5 Conclusions In this chapter, we pay critical attention to unpack and discuss the nuances of visual representations as a type of sociocultural administration in shaping the ways we picture and imagine educational success. A central theme running through this chapter is an interest in the ways in which education and future success are “pictured” in the educational landscape, and how children themselves, in turn, picture their own educational experience and imagined futures. To do so, we focus on both written and

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visual texts in the context of education policy, practices and everyday life to explore how they contribute to the shaping of certain dominant constructions of educational and future success. With reference to a critical perspective, we see the “appearance of learning” as a reflection of global and local quest to the sociocultural imaginaries of successful futures. The making of these imagined futures-being successful and happy are situated within the scope of neoliberal political economy reasoning and nested with a complex web of power relations in which changing forms of power such as policy cultures and educational practices are intertwined to re(con)figure what counts as meaningful learning towards success. The dominant circulation of success requires a particular way of be(com)ing in contemporary educational policy cultures and landscapes. As discussed throughout this chapter, parents, teachers and children are all stakeholders in this “race” to success. In the three global cities of the Global Childhoods project, educational success has been reflected a narrowed vision in which meritocracy is positioned as a driving force in the education systems. For parents and teachers who plan to pave a learning pathway to cultivate successful futures for children, they are becoming stakeholders in the making of the educational landscape. Therefore, the visual images, in what we called “appearance of learning”, are interjecting a different discursive space for us to re-imagine and re-conceptualise what constitutes educational success.

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Chapter 8

Rethinking the Global Childhoods Project: Learning and Everyday Life in Three Global Cities Nicola Yelland

and I-Fang Lee

Abstract In this final chapter, we revisit the aims and scope of the Global Childhoods project. Seeking to gain insights into the lifeworlds of young children aged 9 and 10 years of age, we drew on multiple research methods to inform us about their everyday experiences in three global cities. We began by asking all participants to complete a survey in which they reported what they did outside of school and their thoughts about various aspects of their schooling experience. We then focussed on observing what went on in classrooms to understand their actual lived experiences in schools. We added to this by asking the children four provocations about what they looked forward to at school, how they evaluated their performance to date, what they learnt over a course of a week in their lives and then what they thought they might do when they left school. Finally, we collected more intimate data with individual children and their family by documenting in detail one day after school and locating it in the totality of their week. Through such data sets, our goal was to gain a deeper and fuller understanding of how children’s orientations to educational success have been shaped. Keywords Childhood studies · Lifeworlds · Schooling and education systems · COVID-19 In this chapter, we bring together the findings to consider the ways in which they enlighten us about the cultural practices that inform the discourses associated with educational success and schooling. At the outset of the Global Childhoods project, we were interested in exploring the lifeworlds of children to gain insights to the dominant global constructions of educational success. Coming from a critical ontoepistemological perspective, our research project was concerned with how popular N. Yelland (B) Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne, Carlton, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] I.-F. Lee School of Education, University of Newcastle, Ourimbah, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 I-F. Lee et al. (eds.), Childhood, Learning & Everyday Life in Three Asia-Pacific Cities, Global Childhoods in the Asia-Pacific 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0486-0_8

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versions of educational success have narrowly produced a universal socio-cultural formula for calculating what counts as productive and meaningful learning to ensure “outcomes” and “achievements”. For example, across the three global cities included in this study, most government-led education policies and reforms have focussed on students’ academic achievement and performance as key indicators for their social futures. Being wary of how this way of conceptualising educational success might restrict deeper understandings about children’s multiple forms of learning and living experiences, we drew on a concept of lifeworlds to explore the multiplicities of children’s diverse everyday experiences. Through the concept of lifeworlds, this research study sought to understand how children’s everyday moments are interconnected and shaped by the broader contexts of cultural practices to contribute to discourses of educational experiences of success. The lifeworlds’ conceptual framing of our work enabled us to explore the range of factors that made up and shaped childhood experiences for the children in the study, so that we were able to consider the fluidity of children’s lives beyond school settings which we believe have a major impact on their learning dispositions. As discussed throughout the chapters in this book, we conceptualised lifeworlds of children as encapsulating all aspects of their everyday experiences and recognised that these occur in school, at home and in social/community contexts (Yelland et al., 2008) by exploring a wide range of activities that children participate in, within their school, home and community contexts in each location. We assert that education occurs in lifelong and lifewide contexts and that schooling is just one place in which learning is formalised and maintained by compulsory attendance, mandated policy and curriculum, and where children lives and learning are regulated by these mechanisms which are implemented by teachers. Through this Global Childhood project, we wanted to go beyond schooling into home and community contexts to explore the diverse facets of children’s lifeworlds and the interconnections with their schooling experiences and investigate how these multiple learning and living experiences contribute to their educational experiences. In doing so, we investigated popular educational and socio-cultural practices in each global city to enable us to go beyond simplistic notion of educational success that has been built on the basis of student performance in high-stakes tests. In sum, our aim was to gain deeper understandings about the intersections of systemic and structural factors which also include the out-of-school lives of children as well as their feelings of engagement, belonging and aspirations about learning, school and their future.

8.1 Understanding Children’s Everyday Learning and Living Presented and discussed across the different chapters in this volume, we have explored children’s everyday learning and living including looking into the ways in which policies and cultures are associated with activity in schools and co-implicated in the

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lifeworlds of children. This included reflections about the ways in which children explore spaces and places both inside and outside of school settings and engage in spatial practices that are reflective of lives and experiences in the three global cities. In venturing beyond the results of high-stakes tests that narrowly described students’ academic performance and their understandings about knowledge, we have attempted to characterise children’s experiences and learning competencies beyond such simple metrics. In fact, we have elucidated that even in the reports produced as part of the international testing regimes (e.g. PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS), there are additional data beyond student performance provided in the form of context questionnaires. This data set is foreground to provide new insights for us to mobilise a Bordieuan notion of “scholarly habitus” (Watkins, 2005, 2018) to understand students’ educational experiences while rethinking the notion of educational success in the three global cities. Such data set has highlighted, for example, the contrast between the play-based preschool programmes in Australia with the more formal curricula in Singapore and Hong Kong where a focus on becoming literate and numerate in the context of formal approaches to bi- and tri-lingualism takes on a more predominant role in planning activities in kindergarten and preschool settings. Everyday learning in schools, homes and communities contributes to creating contexts for learning and perpetuating dominant constructions of educational success that can be interrogated to give us critical insights into children’s learning dispositions and their aspirations about their own learnings. The analyses of ethnographic data are located in a critical onto-epistemological perspective. This research paradigm has enabled us to reflect on alternative understandings and framing about the ways in which educational practices are situated in local socio-cultural contexts that have wider ramifications for learning outcomes and students’ educational success. Globally, children often spend a significant amount of hours/days in school settings and the learning activities are highly structured across different cultural contexts. Additionally, many children have their out-of-school time planned for them, with different regimes of activity designed to support them to achieve overall school success. As showed from the survey data set across the three global cities, we looked at what children’s out-of-school activity engagement looked like. These data revealed the diversity of lifeworlds as well as aspects of commonality in terms of having a relative balance of academic and leisure activities across the three global cities among the children who participated in this study. It provided an opportunity for us to destabilise the popular discourse that all East Asian students spend most of their time out of school engaged in academic activities. As our data have revealed that students in Hong Kong and Singapore, like their Australian counterparts, are also engaged in a variety of less structured learning and leisure activities to demonstrate their diverse living experiences that are reflecting the wide range of both academic and non-academic activities that they participated in. As we have noted, each city has its own version of what constitutes official knowledge. Manifested in the form of a national curriculum, each socio-cultural version of “official knowledge” has guided or framed for the compulsory years of schooling in the three global cities. We contend that in the context of schooling in contemporary education systems, national curriculum guidelines or frameworks are the main

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systems of reasoning or socio-political logic that provide an outline to define the socio-political parameters of what needs to be taught and learnt according to the local “authority”. What we have sought to elucidate is the need to challenge as well as to destabilise a popular socio-political logic about what counts as successful education.

8.2 Alternative Discourses: What Do We Know About Contemporary Childhoods? Departing from the global assertion that high-stakes test results could be used to as key indicators to measure educational success or otherwise to predict or determine the successfulness of a country’s education system, we see the importance rethinking what we know about contemporary childhoods. For example, the myths and misunderstandings regarding childhoods in East Asian cultural contexts that have been perpetuated by superficial and ongoing popular media coverage and discussions about the high-performance levels of East Asian students in international tests (e.g. Boman, 2022; Mervis, 2010). While some of these discussions have suggested that Australia’s declining performance could be ameliorated by emulating Asian schooling systems (Baker, 2019; Hunjam & Bloomer, 2016; Reid, 2020), we remain critical with the popular neoliberal discourse that attempts to isolate systemic features believed to enable persistent high academic performances over decades (e.g. Barber & Mourshed, 2007; Baroutsis & Lingard, 2017). We noted that for some time now, education has been thought of as a form of socio-cultural investment through dominant global circulation of neoliberal socio-economic and political discourses. In that, schooling is thought to be the most direct and structured form of education for providing positive outcomes that lead to social progress and national economic development. Heckman (2000) contended that most of the effects that correlate with strong student performance are related to out-of-school variables, yet there has been no research that we could locate that attempts to specifically explain or outline the nature of any effects that have been isolated by various researchers. Similarly, as far back as 1999, Goldhaber et al. (1999) contended that background factors accounted for 60% of student achievement in school. Yet despite this, empirical research has largely focussed on the features of schooling systems (e.g. the first McKinsey report in 2007) to explain consistently high performances. There have been some analyses of the background data collected in PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS that was related to demographic and family variables (Ho, 2010), length of school year (Cheung & Chan, 2008), out-ofschool tuition (OECD, 2011), school quality (Ng, 2008), extent of local autonomy for schools (McConney & Perry, 2008) and the quality and type of homework (Zhu & Leung, 2012), but again it simply offers them as possible explanations for varying performance outcomes and none of the studies explicitly state that it is probably the entanglement of all these factors which are important and that their relevance will vary in different contexts.

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We asserted that there was a need to recognise that the performance data from international high-stakes tests only give a particular type of data about student performance that politicians and systems use because it is a simple numeric way for them to justify policy initiatives as well as to pursue a narrowly defined notion of educational success. What’s dangerous in this trend of neoliberal discourse about educational success and futures is how it totally ignores children’s multiple ways of succeeding beyond standardised numeric descriptions and only regards their performance in terms of benchmarks of academic performance. There is no space to (re)consider and reconceptualise all children as capable in all domains or skill sets; thus, narrowly defined standardised testing or educational achievement dominates constituting “success”. The Global Childhoods project offers an alternative perspective of children’s lifeworlds beyond test results in literacy, mathematics and science which sees them as being agentic and aware of what constitutes their versions of educational success and how they are located in the process of schooling. Our consideration of just some of the broader aspects of their lifeworlds has enabled us to incorporate a different perspective on orientation to what constitutes educational success in the three global cities. Elements of the children’s lifeworlds have been discussed in terms of how they contribute to the children’s engagement with learning and their well-being and sense of belonging in their school, family and communities. We have also reflected on the ways in which students are responding to the expectations placed on them to achieve educational success, as well as exploring the diversity of the students’ lifeworlds. In this way, the findings from the Global Childhoods project have opened up a space to enable: • critical insights into educational, schooling, family and community practices that are located in local social and cultural practices. • opportunities for rethinking the challenges of educational outcomes beyond simple numeric scores under popular neoliberal rationality to inscribe a linear notion of progress and development which severely limit our conceptualisation of what constitutes educational success in global educational jurisdictions. • governments, policymakers, teachers, parents and children to have meaningful conversations at local and global levels of what learning looks like and how a consideration of learning outcomes can provide contexts for discussions about what we value as successful outcomes from schooling that will contribute to societies valuing the diverse student population that we have where everyone can realise and appreciate their different and multiple versions of success and futures.

8.3 Some Concluding Thoughts It is important to note that when we planned and designed the Global Childhoods project, no one had heard of COVID-19 or considered the ramifications of a global pandemic on our taken-for-granted everyday lifeworlds. We completed the multistages of data collection in all three cities just prior to the onset of the pandemic

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before children’s lifeworlds would become more complex, having to shift and relocate between their online and “real” worlds and negotiate various socio-cultural settings and institutions. This makes the data significant as it now represents unique information that was gathered in different times to capture children’s everyday lifeworlds that have changed irrevocably. As such, it might act as a landmark for future collections which may occur in other global cities. Living through the era of COVID-19 pandemic years has created new layers of challenges and experiences to (re)define the notion of childhoods. Since the first months of 2020, children have experienced multiple waves of changes and challenges to their lifeworlds as their schools were closed and their learning shifted into online modes, while they inhabited towns and cities that experienced persistent lockdowns and closed national and international borders. Within the field of education, across multiple cultural settings, our everyday schooling practices and learning experiences have encountered major pedagogical changes as children’s notion of “learning environments” has shifted from physical school locations and classrooms into children’s homes. The everyday taken-for-granted “schooling” practices and learning experiences were replaced with online instructions and different pedagogical practices to redefine how learning might occur. This unprecedented shift in learning opportunities from public spaces to private homes represented a fundamental change to children’s everyday lifeworlds. As we reflect on our data and re-read our fieldnotes of the pre-pandemic everyday practices in Year 4 classrooms, we often wonder how the groups of children who participated in the Global Childhood project experienced these affects and effects of a global pandemic. We still do not know how the months of lockdowns in Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore may have effected children’s lifeworlds and how such experience may have produced new understandings about what constitutes educational success. As the world is transitioning “back” to the notion of “new normal”, we remain critical of the universal notion of “normal”. The chapters in this book have reiterated the importance of not reducing the notion of childhood to a universal narrative. As illustrated and discussed in this volume, we are critical of the notion of universal childhood that is narrowly constructed to perpetuate what constitutes as educational success as being related to performance in high-stakes tests. Through our critical investigation and analysis regarding education policy, and everyday school and out-of-school contexts across the three global cities, we have not sought to create a new or alternative understanding of childhoods. We are conscious that existing dominant discourses about educational and future successes have been assembled to shift our schooling and education practices in a particular direction which may not reflect the capabilities and potential of all children. In doing so, we recognise that any nation’s progress does not reflect the multiplicities of all its young(er) citizens. So, while policies encourage revisions of existing priorities, the contexts of children’s everyday lifeworlds are changing daily and we need to be able to gain deeper understandings about them to be able to respond to them to maximise the potential of everyone in society.

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