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. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article unpacks how neoliberal discourse functions as a dominant but problematic system of reasoning that changes and shifts the ways in which we come to think about early childhood education and care. A post-structuralist lens is deployed to understand the production of fears and hopes under the looming shadows of contemporary education reforms and social policies. Highlighting Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea as three cases from East Asian cultures, this article seeks to elucidate how a similar neoliberal economic and political imaginary is at work to (re)construct East Asian children as human capital for the alchemy of productive citizens in the 21st century.
[Copyright of Policy Futures in Education is the property of Symposium Journals.]

This paper explores the concept of miniature students to interrogate the ways in which early childhood care and education systems in East Asian countries are being constructed. Experiences drawn from working in the Hong Kong education system and observations of teaching and researching in Hong Kong have enabled an analysis about the ways in which young children are conceptualized, normalized, and governed from the beginning of preschool. The purpose of the analysis presented is not to create an alternative grand narrative of childhood or studenthood, but rather to explicate the ways in which young children are being shaped into miniature students from the beginning of their (in)formal educational experiences. A post-structuralist lens is used to explore the ways in which this concept has become manifested within the context of a privatized system, regulated by government and supported by new forms of funding to increase participation. Going beyond the geopolitical space of Asia, the making of miniature students can also be observed in many other countries in which governments focus on 'rigorous' assessment schemes or systems that are considered to result in improved high stakes test scores. The making of miniature students is perpetuated by a drive by governments toward narrow education outcomes.
[International Journal of Early Childhood is a copyright of Springer, 2017]

Vouchers and school choice discourses have been translated, reassembled, and made intelligible in different localities, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, as tactics in education reforms to ensure equality and quality. This paper presents the findings of a comparative research study that aims to investigate the effects of preschool vouchers in Taiwan and Hong Kong. I argue that laced within global and local circulations of educational choice and voucher discourses are notions of marketization and privatization. In that, I seek to understand how preschool voucher systems in Taiwan and Hong Kong work to create a normative socio-cultural administration to (re)-shape, regulate, and construct reasonable/desirable modes of thinking and acting.

Unpacking neoliberal policies: Interrupting the global and local production of the norms Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) has been constructed as a new site for educational, sociocultural, political, and economic investment. Coupled with such a growing and popular recognition of ECEC as a significant period of children's learning and development are critical issues concerning accountability, affordability, and accessibility to quality education and care for all. Highlighting the preschool education systems in Taiwan and Hong Kong as two examples from Asia, this paper aims to open up a discursive space for reconceptualizing the effects of neoliberal discourse and how such a system of reasoning reconstructed notions of inclusion/exclusion to limit the making of quality education and the provision of care for all.
[Copyright of Journal of Pedagogy is the property of Faculty of Education, Trnava University / Centre for Research in Education, Slovak Academy of Sciences.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jped]