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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 examines the “imaginaries” taking place in New Engineering Education (NEE). The NEE is the most recent reform of the engineering education sector in China and is used to interrogate the more encompassing backdrop of the country’s national imaginary, the “Chinese Dream.” Further, this paper analyzes three important policy documents that constitute the blueprint of the NEE. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s concept of the “social imaginary” and using critical discourse analysis, a close analysis of the discursive construction of the technological and national elements in the policy texts is carried out. This combinatory theoretical and analytical framework is used to examine how a normative vision and ideology of the development of engineering education is constructed as taking a “new” direction. In undertaking this policy analysis, this paper demonstrates how a rising power is revolutionizing its engineering education as a resource, coupled with the ideological “social (national) imagination” of the Chinese Dream, to extend its power and geopolitical positioning in a competitive and globalized economy.

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...

This essay argues that a useful grammar for doing post-critique has emerged from a trans-, inter- disciplinary dialogue on post-critique. I further make three propositions in the essay. First, I suggest that postcritique is an additive critical practice where resources for cultivating thinking, reasoning and evaluating draws on a constellation of approaches that combines this and that and reinvigorates critique in new directions. Second, postcritique repairs a ‘negative’ enterprise of critique that has become a culture of teaching in academia and schools. Third, more affirmative pedagogies of postcritique could be more welcoming and considered to be more constructive in authoritarian context.

This article examines whether and how globally mobile middle-class professional families engage in practices of nationalism through forging connections with a ‘home nation’ despite continuous relocations for work. Drawing on the concept of boundary objects which are used to facilitate frequent boundary crossings, we identify the promotion of language acquisition and cultural or national rituals and traditions as two central family practices that maintain strong connections to a form of national belonging despite being physically de-territorialised. We coin the term ‘mobile nationalism’ to make sense of the ways these globally mobile professional parents cultivate a sense of identity, coherence and the necessary resources for future mobility. We argue that these articulations of nationalism continue to be critical as we seek to understand subjecthood formation in the face of the imperatives of globalisation.

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...

In this chapter, the authors outline why and how they developed and deployed the notion of multi-sited global ethnography to study elite schools, globalization, and social class formations and expressions. They offer some selected glimpses of the narratives and insights that arose through their inquiries. The authors look at the intersections between two conceptual frameworks: M. Burawoy's framework for global ethnographies: global forces, global connections, and global imaginations; and framework for sociological inquiry into elite schools: identity, curriculum, culture, community, and nation/national context. These are the key elements identified by ethnographic and other research as central to the elite schooling/social class nexus. This matrix focuses attention both on the institutional life of the school and its more extended communities, and on the ways they are interwoven with global forces, connections, and imaginations.

Multi-sited global ethnography is a methodological contribution to educational research methodology, and more broadly, ethnography. This new methodological framework was designed specifically for the research project “Elite Independent Schools in Globalizing Circumstances,” which studied seven elite schools, one school in each of the following geographical locations: Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Australia, South Africa, Barbados, and England, over a five-year period from 2010 to 2014. The aim of this article is to give a detailed methodological rendition of the epistemologies, and theoretical and conceptual bearings that underpin multi-sited global ethnography. Drawing attention to how the methodology reinvigorates conventional ways of doing ethnography, “different strokes” is used to allude to the new methodological elements we introduced in multi-sited global ethnography. Overall, the article highlighted the insights, hindsight, and oversights gained during and after fieldwork, so that further research can enrich multi-sited global ethnography.

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...

This chapter shifts the focus from England to the various (former) colonies in which we conducted our fieldwork. Here, we examine the coiled conditions of these interlinked but diverse histories of British colonialism, capitalism and Christianity in the contexts of Australia, Barbados, England, Hong Kong, India, Singapore and South Africa. The uneven development of the British Empire is charted by considering the locally mediated and diverse effects of the aforementioned forces on elite schools in these shifting locations and the social relations that they were part of and helped to make. Here, we explore the conjunctures of the relationship between the British nation and the British Empire, the Empire and each situated site, the locally powerful and British imperialists and the connectivity between each of these sites. By using these elite schools as the lens through which we view their identified pasts, we recognize British colonialism as a particular historical form with ongoing effects that shaped, and continue to shape, social relations in globalizing times.

We concentrate on school principals in this chapter and on the various ways they seek to position their schools, staff and students on the global stage while, at the same time, trying to remain faithful to the schools’ and the nations’ roots. Their own biographies prove central to the manner in which, and how successfully, they navigate the tensions involved in practicing their global experiments. In tracing the cultural labour of class choreography, we consider their strategies as well as the pressures and constraints on them, nuanced by their specific national and local historical contexts and their own social and political positions and subjectivities in relation to their class work as principals. We pay particular attention to the articulations of gender, class, race, nation and (post-)coloniality, showing how the various principals respond differently to the demands of and for globalization in their aspirations to perform on the global stage while responding to local/national conditions—both political and economic.

Mobility is the chief concern of this chapter in which we identify some of the elite global circuits that the schools participate in. We show how the schools use the mobilities made possible through prestigious, transnational organizations of elite schools to assist them to produce leaders. And we draw out the details of some students’ itineraries, thereby pointing to students’ variegated geographic mobilities. We argue, in this regard, that the use of the term ‘elite circuits’ can be taken as characteristic of the patterns of mobility that arise in elite schools. It seems that a wealth of opportunities awaits those participating in this elite circuit. We note that elite mobilities are both collectively organized and often collectively beneficial but, at the same time, they do not ensure uninterrupted privileged lives for individual students. They are, furthermore, exclusionary and entangled with subaltern circuits which arise through the moving geographies of the poor, the refugees—those termed by Bauman, ‘vagabonds’ in contrast to the ‘tourists’ of elite mobilities.

This chapter examines how public schools and the public school system evolved in England and indicates how they were linked, over time, to shifting national and colonial social power relationships. We offer this history for a number of reasons. First, the particular model of elite schooling in the seven different former British colonies that we address began with these schools in England. Second, the very peculiar links between this type of school and dominant social groups/classes began there. Third, the elevated location of such schools within the wider education system also began there. Thus, when this particular model of schooling travelled to the many colonies of the vast British Empire, along with it went this public school history—not only of educational practices but also of power relationships. Our contention is that in order to understand both elite schools in the former British colonies and the former colonies in relation to their elite schools, one must start with the history of the boys’ public schools of England, and it this is what we explore in this chapter.

In this chapter we illustrate how, through their iconography and rituals, our research schools marshal represent and use their history and heritage as markers of prestige and success. Thus, we call attention to their manipulation and modulation of history to meet present challenges and the pressure of globalizing change. The chapter shows how the schools’ material and virtual resources are selectively mobilized in hyper-celebratory, highly ornamental ways. Thus, we call attention to the choreographed practices of class-making conducted by these schools as they rearticulate and reinvent their symbolic inheritances in their project of hegemonic stabilization and affirmation.

Students in elite schools live their lives largely through the prism of privilege and, in this chapter, we concentrate on what this means for their politics. We probe the ways students engage their privilege, what they currently do with it and what they plan to do with it in their futures, pointing to the political spectra across which they range. To understand the underlying qualities of this process, we look at the ways in which privilege is enacted by the young people who proceed through these schools in the different places, spaces and times of globalizing social circumstances. We draw here on the interviews and focus groups conducted with the students in 2011 and 2012. Our purpose is to illustrate how the students understand the unequal geographies of social and political power and privilege and how they place themselves and their peers, socially and politically.

We conclude the book by drawing together the connections, conjunctions, juxtapositions and disjunctions that are involved when elite schools undertake class choreography on the global stage. And we consider how they might choreograph their futures as their own contradictions become more manifest and the challenges to their supremacy mount.

Why do more than three-quarters of Hong Kong’s senior secondary students flock to tutorial centres like moths to light? What is the “magic” that is driving the popularity of the tutorial centre enterprise? Indeed, looking at the ongoing boom of tutorial centres in Hong Kong (there are almost 1,000 of them), it is difficult not to ask these questions. This paper examines the phenomenon of tutorial centres in Hong Kong and seeks to understand what draws students to these centres. Combining theories of marketing semiotics and emotion studies, the author investigates the pivotal role of media marketing in generating the “magic” of tutorial centres, whose advertising strategy includes, for example, a display of billboard posters featuring stylishly-dressed “celebrity teachers”. The author reviews some of the literature available on the subject of tutorial centres. In a case study approach, he then maps out the pedagogy he observed in an English tutorial class, seeking heuristic insights into the kind of teaching students in the study were looking for. He argues that part of the “magical” attraction of what are essentially “cram schools” is their formulaic pedagogy of teaching and reinforcing exam skills. Finally, the paper considers the social implications of the tutorial centre industry in terms of media marketing of education and unequal access to tutorial services.

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.

In this article we draw on Bourdieu’s The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power and his associated conceptual apparatus to examine Singapore as a ‘field of power’ and the formation of Singapore’s ‘state nobility’ through an elite secondary school. We ask how well Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus travels, given Singapore’s geo-political history and its strategic positioning with regard to what it calls its ‘global hinterland’. We work with Bourdieu’s notions of ‘social alchemy’, ‘cognitive machine’ and ‘social paradise’ to illuminate how an elite school in Singapore carefully and successfully grooms the future state nobility for Singapore’s field of power, in part through the development of students’ transnational capitals. We show, however, that Bourdieu’s conceptual resources are not fully portable and point to their merits and limitations in explaining the workings of power in Singapore and in relation to one of its most elite schools.