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.

The debate about the effectiveness of the liberal arts curriculum is centuries old, but recent financial and social pressures have placed the survival of the liberal arts in the United States at even greater risk. Using Kimball's (1995) notion of the oratorical and philosophical traditions of liberal education, this article first identifies the critical importance of balancing breadth and depth in the curriculum before honing in on breadth as being in particular danger in the current climate. After analyzing the major threats to breadth in American higher education, the article looks overseas to find a new case for the value of breadth in the curriculum. It focuses on Hong Kong's university system, where a large-scale, multiyear project is underway to graft a fourth year of general education onto a three-year model of discipline- or profession-specific training. The resulting contrast between American institutions discarding curricular breadth while foreign universities rediscover it is telling. This topic has particular relevance for Christian colleges and universities as they seek the holistic development of their students.
Copyright of Christian Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15363759.2015.973344

This editorial discusses the issues and experiences of beginning teachers. The experience of reality shock for beginning teachers can be profound, influencing feelings of belonging to the profession, capacity to teach effectively, and levels of teacher retention. This editorial of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education (A-PJTE) brings together a themed collection of articles focussed on the experience of entering the field of teaching or teacher education for the first time. The range of emotional responses beginning teachers have in response to their early experiences in classrooms comes through clearly in this collection of papers, in particular the effect that access to appropriate support and mentoring for adjusting to life as a teacher has on the confidence of a beginning teacher. With research reported from Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia, the Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education provides insight into what it is like to be a beginning teacher, and reminds readers that learning to belong and contribute to a profession can be a difficult journey.
Copyright of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2014.969415