Picturing Educational and Future Success
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-for-granted 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 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.
Playing with happiness: Biopolitics, childhood and representations of play
Play is a central discourse in policy and practice pertaining to young children’s learning, development and well-being in many countries around the world. Dominant ways of understanding and advocating for play often construct universalising notions of children and childhood, overlooking that play is always-already culturally situated and ideologically inflected. In play discourse, happiness is constituted as an unproblematised condition, goal and outcome of children’s play, and as an antidote to contemporary childhoods burdened by geopolitical, social and environmental issues. In this article, the authors analyse images of children at play in curriculum frameworks, documents and reports, exploring the ways that happiness consistently features as a largely unspoken/unwritten expectation and rationale for policies and policy advocacy concerning play in early childhood. Informed by post-structural theories of biopolitical power, everyday practices and the cultural politics of emotion, and utilising analytical techniques from social semiotics and discourse analysis, the authors argue that visual representations in the documents analysed depict play and happiness as co-implicated. They contend that these representations function in the production of play discourses that both assume and obligate children and childhood to happiness. They interrogate play in these terms, critiquing discursive tropes that are contingent on the co-implication of play and happiness with biopolitical subjectification in order to consider the relevance and utility of play as a policy and pedagogical export to diverse parts of the world.
The Global Childhoods Project: Learning and Everyday Life in Three Global Cities
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).
Lifeworlds of nine- and ten-year-old children: out-of-school activities in three global cities
There has been much discussion about the high performance of East Asian students in international high stakes testing, but little attention has been paid to their lifeworlds beyond school. In this article we explore findings from a survey of 627 Year 4 children (nine and ten years old) in three global cities (Hong Kong, Singapore, and Melbourne), focusing on their out-of-school activities as one aspect of their lifeworlds. The findings indicate that the most common activities in each location were comparable. Since the activities in the three locations were largely similar, the findings problematise East/West binaries which have been a feature of research and discussions in this area.