Cross-border partnerships are increasingly important for higher education in the twenty-first century. Drawing from the business sector’s resource-based theory, this paper explores international partner selection among higher education institutions in Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. According to resource-based theory, institutions may seek partners with specific technical capabilities, managerial capabilities or other intangible resources to access external knowledge and capabilities, develop internal resources and gain competitive advantage. Through document analysis and interviews, this investigation identified twelve attributes that influenced international partner selection for higher education institutions in these contexts. Eleven fit within resource-based theory’s criteria areas of technical capabilities, managerial capabilities and intangible resources. These determined the attractiveness of potential partners. However, existing relationships, the twelfth attribute, was often the deciding factor of whether or not a partnership would move forward. Importantly, while contextual differences were observed, these attributes were present across contexts.

This article explores early childhood curriculum reform in Australia and Singapore in order to identify international trends in early childhood education (ECE), similarities in curriculum reform initiatives and implementation strategies adopted. We have observed the existence of many shared ideas across the two contexts that may influence educational experience. In both countries teachers in early childhood services have been identified as having a major role to play in curriculum reform. In this article we explore the role of teachers in the reform process and question the reliance on one stakeholder group to ensure planned changes to the ECE reform agenda occur. Data from teacher interviews are presented. Historical events that have impacted on the development of ECE services and government policies in Australia and Singapore are described and obstacles that have potentially hampered the reform process in both countries are acknowledged.

Numerous challenges associated with the work of teaching have been reported around the globe, including from Singapore. Being a multi-dimensional problem, teachers’ work has been investigated by diverse research methods especially through interviewing. However, educational studies that adopt constructionist approaches have been scarce in Singapore, and none have used it to investigate teachers’ work here. This study based on Discursive Psychology, thus, analyzes interview data from school teachers in Singapore talking about their work. Specifically, interviewing is taken as a “topic,” which prioritizes how talk is co-constructed, rhetorically motivated, and likely with contradictions over the disclosure of information (i.e., taking interviewing as “resource”); various discursive strategies perform diverse rhetorical functions for speakers. There are two interrelated contributions from this study: (i) an increased appreciation of a constructionist approach like Discursive Psychology during interviewing, and (ii) the opening of different perspectives and generative research questions about teachers’ work in Singapore. © 2021, Education Research Institute, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea.

Pedagogical documentation within early childhood centres is a key component of pedagogy and teacher accountability. In Singapore, documentation is a requirement specified under legislative policies included in the national Pre-school Accreditation Framework, with parents often perceived as the main audience. This paper reports on a study utilising Rogoff’s observation on social cultural activities to focus on the interconnectedness between children, parents and teachers as stakeholders in the early childhood sector. An electronic survey was used to ascertain parents’ perspectives on documentation of their child’s learning and development. Analysis of this data was shared in five individual teacher interviews to explore responses to the parents’ perspectives. Findings of this study affirmed that documentation varied as a process and a product of pedagogy in early childhood centres. Within a climate of assessment and accountability, these findings invite inquiry and offer possibilities for professional learning on improving pedagogical documentation across the sector. © 2022 EECERA.

In 1997, Singapore’s Ministry of Education (MOE) committed itself to an ambitious programme of pedagogical reform in Singaporean schools in anticipation of the kind of institutional challenges – particularly those in increasingly globalized labour markets – that young Singaporeans were likely to face in the coming decades. Since then, the Ministry has designed and implemented a series of initiatives that, the authors suggest, will go a considerable distance to achieve its objectives. These initiatives focus on substantial changes in the system of ‘instructional governance’ in Singapore over the past decade, and efforts to change the pattern of classroom pedagogy. But while these represent a good start, the authors argue that these initiatives do not go quite far enough to close the gap between policy and practice. And while the improvement of classroom pedagogy in the long run will depend on the improvement of initial teacher education, it is also the case that, given what is known about the circumstances that optimize professional learning in both pre-service and in-service programmes, the improvement of teacher education will depend substantially on the prior improvement of classroom pedagogy. How Singapore might escape this conundrum is the central focus of this paper.