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

ABSTRACT

There has been much discussion about the high performance of East Asian students in international high stakes testing, but little attention has been paid to their lifeworlds beyond school. In this article we explore findings from a survey of 627 Year 4 children (nine and ten years old) in three global cities (Hong Kong, Singapore, and Melbourne), focusing on their out-of-school activities as one aspect of their lifeworlds. The findings indicate that the most common activities in each location were comparable. Since the activities in the three locations were largely similar, the findings problematise East/West binaries which have been a feature of research and discussions in this area.

KEYWORDS:

• Children’s time use
• after school activities
• lifeworlds
• Australia
• Hong Kong
• Singapore

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The project was approved by the Flinders University Social and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee (Australia), the Department of Education and Training (Victoria, Australia), NTU Institutional Review Board (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), and Ministry of Education (Singapore). In addition, the project was approved by the University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Committee when the head of the project transferred there from Flinders University. Hong Kong does not have the same formal ethics requirements and therefore additional approval there was not required.

2 In all figures, totals might not always add to 100% (or to totals given in the text). This is because of rounding error in the percentages shown in the figures.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council: Grant Number DP180100325.