Soo, Johannah Li Mei

This book examines connections between policy contexts, school experiences and everyday activities of children growing up in the global city of Singapore. In particular, it explores how Singapore children’s everyday experiences inside and outside of school shape their orientations towards educational success. Alongside an analysis of school life and educational policies, it also considers children’s out-of-school activities, including leisure, homework, and enrichment activities, and connections between these and their school-based activities. The book draws on empirical data from Primary 4 classes in two Singapore schools in the form of student-completed surveys, classroom ethnographies, student responses to a learning dialogues activity, and a re-enactment of one child's out-of-school life, as well as curriculum and policy analysis. It provides readers with an in-depth understanding of Singapore Primary 4 children’s experiences inside and outside of school, including the structure of timetables and pedagogical approaches encountered in school lessons, children’s enjoyment of activities inside and outside of school, children’s engagement and wellbeing at school, and the impact of Singapore’s educational policies on children’s learning experiences. Moving beyond a simplistic focus on Singapore children’s academic performance in international high-stakes testing, the book offers a comprehensive exploration of their lives inside and outside of school. This holistic approach is unique in the Singapore context and contributes to a greater understanding of children’s everyday lives in the city.

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.

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.

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 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.