Search

We start this issue by celebrating a new format for our book reviews, which we have introduced for the International Studies in Sociology of Education. Our book reviews editor, Dr. Luke Lu, intervi...

Schools have long been identified by sociologists as core institutions within society, responsible for contributing to the national, public good; contributing to the structural glue that holds toge...

International schools in China have enjoyed soaring popularity in recent years. Many of these schools adopt curricular forms and/or school brands originating from the US, UK or Canada, and they bra...

In this paper the authors study 19 Global Middle Class (GMC) families currently residing in four global cities: Hong Kong; London; Buenos Aires; and Tel Aviv. Through qualitative in-depth interviews, they sought to gather insights about GMC parenting strategies, specifically drawing attention to the decision-making processes of school choice. To facilitate their analysis, they draw on Bourdieu’s theory on types of capital and Ben-Porath’s notion of bounded rationality. From the inductive analysis of their interview data with mobile GMC parents, they identified a subtype of cultural capital they called ‘cosmopolitan start-up capital’. The overall argument in the paper is that the accumulation of cosmopolitan start-up capital is a specific strategy guiding the GMC families’ school choice practices, set within a frame of mobilities. Given the growing number of mobile families who continuously enter and exit local education systems, focusing on this group is pertinent for policy makers and practitioners around the world.

This paper highlights how a small group of minority students worked to take advantage of the privileges available once they were admitted to an elite school. The argument proposed is that, unlike t...

This issue marks the beginning of a new team of editors coming on board to facilitate the continuing growth of the International Studies in Sociology of Education (ISSE). We are a group of scholars...

The rise of multinational corporations, which have come to dominate the global economy in the last decades, has been supported and accompanied by an upsurge of a new group of globally mobile profes...

This article is a response to Allan Luke’s [(2018). Critical literacy, schooling, and social justice: The selected works of Allan Luke. New York, NY: Routledge] provocation to “join an internationa...

The implementation of moral and national education (MNE) in Hong Kong came to a stand-still when in 2012 anti-MNE student protests triumphantly saw it being shelved. Many perceived MNE as indoctrination and politically motivated by the leadership. Five years have gone by since the demise of the MNE. Ostensibly, the struggle for hegemonic control over the MNE curriculum is lost for the moment. However, this paper argues that the battle for control over the implementation of MNE is not yet over. Simmering politics about the shelved MNE continues to be a point of debate in the media. I frame this argument using “subterfuge hegemony” in conjunction with analysis of news discourse on the MNE debate to demonstrate how hegemonic work is carried out in South China Morning Post. Such a line of inquiry and analyses is significant as it offers the chance to deconstruct the differing interests and power relations around a high stake citizenship/civics education. It also throws light on the on-going tensions b...

English teaching and learning has taken an interesting shift in Hong Kong schools with the implementation of the New Senior Secondary (NSS) curriculum under the ‘334’ education reform. Situating the paper within the broader considerations of the intersection of Cultural Studies and English teaching, this paper examines the challenges and prospects of teaching the new Language Arts elective called Learning English through Popular Culture module. It is argued that while the module endeavours to connect and motivate Hong Kong students to learn English through popular culture materials, the official curriculum and schemes of work, however, narrowly articulate the teaching of popular culture texts conceived as ‘text-types’. Such a formulaic approach to using popular culture in the classroom is limiting and locks students into a procedural way of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ popular cultural texts. The paper concludes by offering some ways forward that might deliver what is otherwise a revolutionary and innovative cu...

The elite school. What is it? Clearly this is not an un-subjective, universal or timeless category. Elite schools rise and fall, new types emerge and make status claims, older types stand firm or f...

It is purely a matter of (timely) coincidence that this special issue is published at the cusp of Singapore's golden jubilee. Fifty years of nation-building may not be considered long in historical...

This paper examines the specificity of the education–class nexus in an elite independent school in Singapore. It seeks to unravel the puzzle that meritocracy is dogmatically believed in Singapore in spite of evidences that point to the contrary. The paper draws on discursive (analysis of media materials) and institutional (analysis of interview conducted in Clarence High school) processes to mount the argument that doing class analysis in Singapore's elite education is couched in a peculiarity, where meritocratic principles override all criticisms and contentions of the reproduction of educational privileges and advantages. The analysis of the overriding ‘meritocratic talk’ in the interviews conducted will show how the national doxa of meritocracy creates the belief environment that leads to institutional practices that echoes the dogma of meritocracy.

This article mobilizes story-telling to narrate my lived experience of teaching English as a minority academic in one Australian university. Positioning myself as living ‘in-between’ two cultures and as an ‘Other’, I tell my story of how I have been ‘racialized’ and ‘Othered’ because I do not look White, and my spoken English is distinctly accented; hence, my legitimacy of teaching English is held suspect. My story contributes to the theorizing of the sociology of the in-between with the argument that while living in-between culture can be a space of negativity, it can also be a space of empowerment if one exercises choice and agency by forging new spaces. I end my story-telling with a happy ending by presenting a contrasting story of how my run-away from Australia to (a new space in) Hong Kong to teach English has reaffirmed my cultural capital as I morph into a different ‘Other’.

As a meta-concept, ‘globalization’ has the tendency to create master categories such as an emergent global/izing education policy. This paper critiques the thinking and assumptions that underpin a global education policy. The paper proposes that ‘global assemblage’ is a more helpful conceptual thinking about the way education policy works in globalizing circumstances. Conceptually, the notion of an assemblage helps us to re-conceive global forms not as a totalizing external force but as an element that works in combination with other heterogeneous elements in local situations and contexts. Aspects of Singapore's education policy landscape are analyzed as part of Singapore's ‘global assemblage’ to reveal a culture of education policy making that is constituted by heterogeneous elements such as global techniques, situated politics and ethics.

The attention to the visualization of education policy is an area of study yet to be developed and explored. This paper extends the scholarship of ‘media‐ted education policy production’ by developing a visual methodology to analyse a visual education policy document that takes the form of a documentary titled Learning Journeys (2000), which documented an uptake of and for the ‘Thinking Schools, Learning Nation’ policy in Singapore schools after this policy came into effect in 1997. My analysis specifically draws attention to the concept of ‘visual design’, which I argue works ideologically to constrain the semiotic meaning potential of visual texts to a preferred reading path, and that ‘design’ textually contributes to an ideological closure as opposed to an open, multiple or contradictory reading of the text. Any critical reading of visual policy texts, I argue, must understand that ‘design’ in visual policy texts is situated and intertwined in the complex interplay of institutional constraints, ideolog...

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has reached a certain degree of canonical status, as it is widely used and applied as a research and analytic tool. However, hitherto it has been taken for granted that CDA can be applied and practised anywhere unproblematically. There is still a dearth of scholarly attention that focuses on the tensions and in/compatibility of CDA as a critical and analytical toolkit when applied in authoritarian regimes. This article attempts to fill the gap of research in this field by relocating the practice of CDA to the Singaporean context – a context widely known for its conservative political culture where dissent sits uncomfortably in its political arena. Although CDA can be valuable for research in such a context, the consequence of applying such a ‘critical’ toolkit may result in more than the generation of academic knowledge. I argue in the paper that doing CDA in an authoritarian context may be a risky enterprise. Thus, strategies and modes of expression must be adapted for t...

Research on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has hitherto attracted scholarly attention and debate by both regional and international scholars working in area studies, such as int...

This article discusses how the media and schools are used as disciplinary apparatuses to resist and work against globalisation in Singapore. Aihwa Ong calls the deployment of state ideological apparatuses, such as the media and schools, acts of ‘reassemblage’, when technocrats resort to assemble institutions, diverse Government practice and political values to engage in citizenship production. The National Education curriculum package introduced to Singapore schools is one example of ‘reassemblage’, which aims to reinvent subject‐citizens who are perceived as lacking cultural mooring and a national identity. I argue that in the context of globalisation, this cultural experimentation of constructing a national identity and creating a sense of belonging is fraught with ruptures, as ‘youthscapes’ and new communication technologies are potentially the liminal spaces where other sources of identities are up for grabs. These liminal spaces further allow youths to perform ‘elective belonging’ rather than a sense...

In view of the broad scope of literature on globalization, this paper provides a synoptic reading of some of the globalization literatures, organized as ‘discourses’. The analysis of the discourses on globalization is confined to three overlapping discourses, namely, regional, ideological and economic discourses. Specific references and examples of local uptake of globalization will be drawn from Singapore and the wider Asia pacific region, as Beck (2002) has reminded us that we cannot even think about globalization or discuss it effectively without the reference to specific locations and places. Hence the subtitle of this paper, ‘A View from the East’, is deliberate to signal the often forgotten fact that Singapore, as well as the wider Asia Pacific region, is ‘part of the “global” sphere that the West has dispersed itself into’.

This paper critically examines recent education reform in Singapore launched under the rhetoric of “Thinking Schools, Learning Nation” (TSLN). I will make explicit the context and the premises underlying the new state‐initiated TSLN education reform. I argue that the re‐alignment of education change is a response to the trajectories of (global) economic conditions, concomitantly framed by (local) sociopolitical and cultural–ideological needs. Next, I tease out and critique the pedagogical problems and contradictions embedded in the TSLN education reform. The paper concludes by asking what critical perspectives can be drawn from the Singapore case vis‐a`‐vis globalisation and education reform.

(2002). Towards a critical pedagogy: Creating 'thinking schools' in Singapore. Journal of Curriculum Studies: Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 255-264.