Asian Childhoods: Exploring the Lifeworlds of Students in Contemporary Hong Kong

Abstract

In this article, the authors discuss the findings of two surveys that were conducted with 10-year-old primary students and their parents in Hong Kong. They sought to gather empirical data about how the students spend their time in out-of-school contexts in order to interrogate the view that Asian students often spend much of their time studying, with little leisure time. The authors were concerned that there was an absence of empirical data on this topic. Increasingly, there is a recognition that Asian students perform well in high-stakes international tests, and a widely held view is that this is because they dedicate so much time to intensive academic study in contrast to their ‘Western’ counterparts. The social and cultural capital derived from doing well in school systems is an established feature of many global contexts. In the competitive environment that characterises education in Hong Kong, progression through the system is based solely on examination scores, and justified on the basis that this is both equitable and allows the best students to thrive. Tutorial schools that train attendees in the art of testing are multimillion-dollar industries – but who are the clients? In this article, the authors reveal that at 10 years of age, the out-of-school lives of the students surveyed contain many and varied activities. They attend school and, in out-of-school contexts, complete homework, participate in activities that both incorporate new media (for example, television and computers) and others (for example, indoor and outdoor play), and do not.

Towards learning dialogues as data: researching children's lifeworlds in global cities

“…The Global Childhoods project had its origins in the first author's study Millennial Kids Learning from 2009 to 2010, based in Hong Kong but also including children from Melbourne and New York. The Millennial Kids Learning project aimed to explore children's lives and learning in Kindergarten, Primary 1 and Primary 5 (ages 3, 6 and 10 years), drawing on a student-completed quantitative survey and classroom ethnographies (Yelland et al, 2012;Yelland et al, , 2017Yelland and Muspratt, 2018). The Global Childhoods project extended this earlier project, with a focus on the lifeworlds of Year 4 (ages 9 and 10 years) children in global cities (Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore) in the year that the first international high stakes testing regimes (TIMSS and PIRLS) begins.…”

Contemporary Childhoods in Asia: Becoming (Pre)School Students in Hong Kong

“…I am wary of making a dangerous generalisation of the 'Hong Kong childhood' as the version of 'Asian childhood'. Thus, I seek to understand what it means to be a child in Hong Kong, what childhoods may look like for some Hong Kong children (but not all), and what constitutes 'typical' early childhood experiences in Hong Kong as examples of the different faces of 'Asian Childhoods' (Yelland et al, 2012).…”

“…Hence, the making and production of miniature students in Hong Kong preschools, like many children's studenthoods in Asia, are to be situated within the sociocultural contexts of their childhood experiences (I.F. Lee & Tseng, 2008;Yelland et al, 2012;Park et al, 2013; I.F. Lee & Yelland, 2014).…”

Lifeworlds of nine- and ten-year-old children: out-of-school activities in three global cities

“…Our previous research (e.g. Yelland 2014; Yelland and Muspratt 2018;Yelland, Muspratt, Chan, and Gilbert 2012;Gilbert 2013, 2017) has documented the wide range of activities that Hong Kong children aged from 6 to 12 years spend their time on out of school and found little support for the 'East Asian student' who spends a majority of time studying, which is particularly evident in academic and policy debates around high stakes testing.…”

“…In this article we use the concept of lifeworlds to consider aspects of children's lived experiences at school, at home, and in the community, where they are growing up in conditions of rapid globalisation, technological advancement and social transformation (Yelland, Muspratt, and Gilbert 2017;Yelland, Muspratt, Chan, and Gilbert 2012). We explore the lifeworlds of students in three global cities (Melbourne, Hong Kong and Singapore), here focusing particularly on students' activities outside of school as one aspect of their lifeworlds.…”