Aaron Koh

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• Doctor of Philosophy (Education)
• Professor at National Chung Cheng University

This chapter imagines Bourdieu is still alive and is on an invited visit to Hong Kong. On the invitation of the Hong Kong government as education consultant, he is commissioned to study Hong Kong’s persistent educational inequality despite the government’s provision of twelve years of free compulsory education. His task is to come up with recommend...

There is a growing literature studying the 'non-traditional' type of international schools. However, a less explored and under-theorised area is the changing dynamics of the global-local interactions in the way these international schools are being redefined and shaped by local processes, regimes of control, and mechanisms. Drawing on empirical evi...

The enrolment of Chinese middle-class children in elite international kindergartens is a big education industry in China. Our paper is situated in the broader sociology of elite schooling which has yet to fully explore how middle and upper middle-class parents are increasingly sending their children to elite international kindergartens. We present...

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 brand themselves as American-style (meishi), British-style (yingshi) and Sino-Canadian (zhongjia) international schools respectively. Beyond this general ob...

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 their more privileged peers, minority students who have made it through the gateways of elite schools have to work out a salvation of privilege to level u...

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 c...

Book Review of Paul Willis (2020). Being Modern in China. Polity

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...

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 fa...

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 langua...

Multi-sited ethnography; global ethnography; Marcus; Burawoy; Elite schools; qualitative method

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

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 ov...

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 betwe...

This paper presents the biographies of elite students and their purposeful mobilities. Their biographies are constructed from Skype interviews following their second year out of school. The focus of this paper is to trace the travel trajectories of a small set of students whose post school lives show what a reality check looks like outside the “soc...

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 tension...

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.

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 unev...

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....

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,...

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 add...

In this chapter, we point to the institutional tussles involved as the schools seek to reshape their curricula so that they intersect in the most propitious ways with global, national and local imperatives. The most significant disputations, we illustrate, involve examination systems, language studies and national versus international curricula. We...

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 s...

Elite schools have always been social choreographers par excellence. The world over, they put together highly dexterous performances as they stage and restage changing relations of ruling. They are adept at aligning their social choreographies to shifting historical conditions and cultural tastes. In multiple theatres, they now regularly rehearse t...

Elite schools are contentious institutions and elicit intense debate. They are seen to either represent schooling's gold standard and to produce highly educated luminaries who rightfully take their places at the apogee of all the institutions that matter. Or they are seen as socially isolated, luxury enclaves that breed and feed privilege and power...

There is something spectacular about the visual ecology of tutorial centre advertisements that is circulating in the mediascape of Hong Kong. It is difficult to miss these scintillating, attention-grabbing advertisements. They are everywhere in the public spaces of Hong Kong. Not only do they appear as huge billboards erected on well-trafficked ave...

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...

The attention to the visual field is making significant methodological contribution in ethnographic research. Yet there is no one definitive ‘method’ and ‘theory’ agreed upon to deal with visual data because new (mobile) technologies and theoretical explorations are changing the methodological palette of doing ethnography. Indeed contemporary ethno...

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 question...

1. Education in the global city: the manufacturing of education in Singapore Aaron Koh and Terence Chong 2. Vocational education in Singapore: meritocracy and hidden narratives Terence Chong 3. Language politics and global city Lionel Wee 4. Mobility and desire: international students and Asian regionalism in aspirational Singapore Francis L. Colli...

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 con...

This chapter is situated within the scholarship of cultural sociology of education with a view to understand the contemporary work of elite schools in globalising circumstances. It seeks to lay bare the theoretical, conceptual and pedagogical underpinnings of a ‘mobile curriculum’.

This chapter aims to unpack the discourses in the Thinking Schools, Learning Nation (TSLN) education reform. To achieve this, I draw on two sets of toolkit, one conceptual and the other analytical. The conceptual section draws on Charles Taylor’s (Modern social imaginaries. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004) notion of social imaginary...

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...

Elite schools are banks of emotion where the individuals and social classes that they serve deposit their desires and gain social dividends. They are also registers of social recognition and serve as spaces of collective capacity for their privileged clients. Elite schools have long been sites for the exercise of a form of affective agency by the w...

This paper explores the leadership cultivation practices of one elite school in Singapore. We point to the links between the habitus of the Singapore state and that of the school showing how different components of the school’s leadership curriculum deploy the transnational in order to produce leaders for the nation. In essence, we argue that the s...

Hitherto, research on transnational higher education student mobility tended to narrowly present hard statistics on student mobility, analysing these in terms of ‘trends’ and the implication this has on policy and internationalizing strategies. What is missing from this ‘big picture’ is a close-up analysis of the micropolitics of student mobility i...

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...

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 global...

The Ministry of Education in Singapore has embarked on the ambitious project of introducing IT in schools. The IT Masterplan, budgeted at a cost of $2 billion, aims to wire up all schools by the year 2002. While the well-funded IT Masterplan is seeing the project in its final phase of implementation, this paper argues for a "critical cyber pedagogy...

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 docume...

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/com...

Singaporeans need not be told what globalization means. The popular media, as well as the political leaders of Singapore, have generated a "local-babble" of the derivative meanings of globalization. That globalization means "competitiveness", "innovation", "creativity", "entrepreneurship", and "foreign talent", has become deeply enculturated and em...

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 international relations and Asia-Pacific/Southeast Asia studies. Confined to area studies, scholarly research on ASEAN is limiting because the parameters of...

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 politic...

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...

This article presents an analysis of two state ideological apparatuses in Singapore to understand how the city-state constructs its sense of nationhood and national identity. The analysis shows how Singapore uses the media to represent its impoverished national identity, and through a state-led curriculum intervention, uses National Education to re...

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) eco...

Little is known and written about newspaper literacy in the classroom. Yet reading the Straits Times constitutes an important part of the "English" curriculum for pre-university students in Singapore. The study reported in this article is part of a larger classroom intervention project, which aims to investigate how first-year, pre-university stude...

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Singaporeans need not be told what globalization means. The popular media, as well as the political leaders of Singapore, have generated a "local-babble" of the derivative meanings of globalization. That globalization means "competitiveness", "innovation", "creativity", "entrepreneurship", and "foreign talent", has become deeply enculturated and em...