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. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

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. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.