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.
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This paper reports an exploratory investigation of the information-literacy levels of primary 5 students in Hong Kong. Factors such as gender and reading ability were also examined. Primary 5 students from four local schools completed a fourteen-item information-literacy assessment (ILA), which was adopted and modified from questions on the sixth-grade version of the Tool for Real-time Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (TRAILS). The ILA covered five TRAILS categories and three American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) IL standards to measure different aspects of information literacy. Reading ability was measured by questions from a local public test of reading comprehension. On average, the participants (n = 199) achieved a mean score of 9.12 (SD = 2.56), and most assessment items showed room for improvement. Female students (n = 97; 48.7 percent) scored higher on the ILA than their male counterparts (n = ProQuest: 102; 51.3 percent), suggesting female students' higher level of information literacy. Results also revealed a positive and significant relationship between students' information literacy and reading ability. These findings offer a preliminary understanding of the information literacy of children in Hong Kong.
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Cities are considered to be the major drivers of the global economy for many reasons, including their creative and innovative potential in generating sustainable economic growth. Istanbul is one of the global cities searching for a long-term growth strategy. This paper starts with a modest effort of composing an index to be used in the evaluation of the creative potential of cities. Our proposed index, "global creative index", consists of five main criteria: (1) creativeness, (2) innovativeness, (3) intellectual development, (4) global network connectivity and (5) world cityness emphasizing multinational corporate economy, international division of labour and high intensity of producer and financial services. The use of the index is illustrated through the comparison of nine cities: Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, New York, Shanghai, Singapore and Toronto. The analysis of these nine cities shows that Istanbul is building an innovation environment, but it still lacks research and development infrastructure, technical support and investment in higher education. This comparison offers guidelines for policy-makers to sketch the growth of Istanbul along the lines of creativity and innovativeness.
[Copyright of European Planning Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2012.680583]