Search results

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the major development of global citizenship education (GCE) as part of Hong Kong’s secondary school curriculum guidelines, which reveals how it has developed from, first, asking students to understand their responsibilities as citizens to now challenging injustice and inequality in the world. Hong Kong’s curriculum guidelines started to teach GCE as a result of the last civic education guideline issued just before the return of sovereignty to China in 1997. Through documentary analysis, this paper examines how GCE has developed against the backdrop of globalization in Hong Kong’s various secondary school curriculum guidelines.

This study used documentary analysis to examine the developments in the teaching of GCE via Hong Kong’s official secondary school curriculum guidelines. It has studied the aims, knowledge and concepts that are related to GCE by coding the GCE literature and categorizing the findings from the curriculum guidelines.

From the coding and categorizing processes employed, it has been found that GCE in Hong Kong’s official curriculum guidelines has evolved from learning about rights and responsibilities in the 1990s to challenging injustice, discrimination, exclusion and inequality since the late 1990s. Indeed, understanding the world and especially globalization, in terms of comprehending the processes and phenomena through which people around the globe become more connected, has presented challenges for the teaching of civic education. For example, categories of GCE have developed from the simpler expression of concerns about the world to encompass moral obligations and taking action. Similarly, the concerns for the maintenance of peace that were studied initially have since grown and now include work about challenging inequalities and taking action on human rights violations.

This study would have implications for the understanding of GCE in Hong Kong as well as other fast-changing societies in this age of globalization, as civic education curricula need to respond to the impacts of globalization. GCE is an under-researched area, but topics concerning world/international/global affairs have been covered in Hong Kong secondary school curriculum guidelines for several decades.

Hong Kong is a case that demonstrates the distinctively multi-dimensional nature of citizenship within and in relation to a given nation. The purposes of this paper are to: first, discuss Hong Kongers’ unique identity and the influence of political, historical and economic factors on them in order to show the value of challenging the “national citizenship” approach as a dominant discourse in the intended curriculum of Hong Kong citizenship education; second, analyze the efforts of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to foster a stronger sense of Chinese national identity in Hong Kong students; and third, evaluate the appropriateness of this nationalistic approach by examining its compatibility with and coherence to in relation to the implemented and attained curriculum.

This study analyzes existing scholarly discussions on the PRC’s emphasis on Chinese national identity in citizenship education and negative perceptions held by teachers and students regarding the approach and presentation of their actual teaching and learning practices for citizenship education with empirical data.

This paper illuminates the mismatch found between the intended curriculum and the implemented and attained curriculum in terms of the viewpoints of good citizens.

The notion of “cultural citizenship” is suggested as an alternative approach to developing the curriculum of Hong Kong citizenship education. This paper will be of interest to those curriculum scholars, educational authorities and teachers who are interested in developing and implementing the curriculum of citizenship education.

This qualitative multiple-case study research attempts to examine controversies associated with national education and national identity by exploring the perceptions of national identity of Hong Kong secondary school teachers. Since the resumption of Hong Kong's sovereignty by China in 1997, national identification with Chinese has been a policy priority. Hong Kong has seen an increase of national education, which aims at cultivating a Chinese national identity.

The study was conducted with case study method with a convenient sampling method on ten purposively chosen sample of Hong Kong secondary school teachers, who are responsible for citizenship education in their schools. It is a qualitative research design with each teacher interviewed twice to obtain in-depth interview data.

The findings reveal that teachers perceive their national identity with different emphases, which include both elements of civic and ethnic nationalism. Also, Hong Kong teachers showed a diversified perception of their national identity both before and after 1997, and it was found that political, social and personal events exerted influences upon their national identification. These have implication for understanding identity issue and teaching citizenship education in Hong Kong.

This paper attempts to make a contribution towards understanding teachers’ perceptions of national identity by revealing that Hong Kong teachers perceive their national identity with both elements of civic and ethnic nationalism, and their perceptions are mediated by political, social and personal events. Furthermore, multiple levels of identities, namely, local, national, and global levels, should be observed.

National identification among young people and the issues about how national education should be conducted have been the significant topics when the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was entering its third decade of the establishment. This paper was written based on data the authors obtained upon participation in a project organized by the Centre for Catholic Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The project was carried out after the official curriculum, known as the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide, was shelved due to popular resentment. The project aimed at capturing the timely opportunity for substantial resources available for school-based operation of moral and national education and developing an alternative curriculum about teaching national issues and identification for Catholic Diocese and Convent primary schools to adopt. This paper aims to investigate the nature of this Catholic Project and examines the extent to which it is a counterhegemonic project or one for teaching to belong to a nation (Mathews, Ma and Lui, 2007). It assesses the project’s possible contribution to citizenship and national education in Hong Kong, since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide.

The authors of this paper worked in an education university of Hong Kong and were invited to be team members of this Catholic Project. The role comprised proposing topics for teacher training, conducting seminars, giving comments to teaching resources, observing and giving feedback to schools that tried out the teaching and designing/implementing an evaluative survey and conducting follow-up interviews with involved parties such as teachers and key officials of the Catholic Centre. Given this, the research involved can be perceived as action research. This paper was written up with both the qualitative and quantitative data the authors collected when working the project.

This paper reported a Catholic citizenship training project with the focus on a Catholic school project on preparing students to understand the nation by learning national issues analytically. The ultimate goal was to ensure teachers in Catholic primary schools could lead the students to examine national issues and other social issues from the perspective of Catholic social ethics. Though the project arose after the failure of the government to force through its controversial national education programme, this paper found that instead of being an alternative curriculum with resistance flavour, the project was basically a self-perfection programme for the Catholic. It was to fill a shortfall observed of Catholic schools, namely, not doing enough to let students examine social and national issues with Catholic social ethics, which, indeed, had a good interface with many cherished universal values. In the final analysis, the project is not a typical national education programme, which teaches students to belong to a nation but an innovative alternative curriculum transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions as advanced by western literature (for example, Gramsci, 1971; Freire, 1970; and Apple, 1993).

The paper contributes to the literature of Hong Kong studies and citizenship education studies. The results of such an innovative endeavour, which captures and capitalizes the opportunity and resources for developing a national education curriculum in school-based manner. Attention was paid to the endeavour’s nature and its possible contribution to the knowledge, policies and practices of citizenship and national education in Hong Kong amidst deep social transformations. In particular, the paper can add to the specific literature about Hong Kong’s citizenship and national education development since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide. Using an empirical example of Asian schooling and society, analysis of this paper illustrates the way in which development of an alternative curriculum is more innovative and interesting, transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions.

The purpose of this paper is to offer the latest empirical findings of the difficulties and challenges in teaching New Senior Secondary (NSS) Liberal Studies in Hong Kong from the perspective of pre-service teachers.

This qualitative study is based on Danielewicz’s critical pedagogy framework for identity development. A sample of four pre-service teachers were recruited from the last cohort of final-year bachelor of education students at the University of Hong Kong. They were invited to engage in dialogues of enquiry, through which they recount their teaching encounters during their teaching practices. Emphasis would be put on two relevant pedagogical principles, including deliberation and reflexivity, which are of particular relevance to the case of Liberal Studies.

Challenges revealed the dispositions of conformist learning among the students, manifested in forms of misquoted information and the populist sentiments mirrored from mainstream media, which cost teachers extra efforts to facilitate inquiry-based learning. Adopting deliberation and reflexivity as pedagogical principles, student–teachers responded with attempts to reconnect daily life experiences to teaching, bringing back the social context of knowledge and seeking synergy between traditional and liberatory teaching methods.

This study is drawn from a relatively small sample of pre-service teachers and may run the risk of over-generalization. Moreover, this study tends to neglect other factors such as classroom dynamics, school culture, colleagues’ rapport and students’ responses.

Given the novelty of Liberal Studies as a compulsory subject under the NSS curriculum and its specificity in Hong Kong education system, the amount of literature devoted to this area has been inadequate; among the available studies, the majority tend either to focus on the macro level, addressing the broader narratives of education policies and curriculum studies (e.g. Fung and Yip, 2010; Cheung and Leung, 1998) or to discuss the topic with exclusive reference to political transition and post-colonialism in the 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Morris and Chan, 1997). Studies on the micro level have generally paid little attention to the dynamics of Liberal Studies teaching, focusing instead on its relationships with other aspects such as private tutoring (Chan and Bray, 2014) and cultural representations of religion in Liberal Studies textbooks (Jackson and Han, 2016); pedagogical studies on the subject remain a minority.

This chapter traces one student teacher's (Joan) experiences of learning to teach English as a second language in a cross-cultural context during a teaching practicum in Hong Kong. The school-based practicum is a core component of many initial teacher education programmes. During this induction period, usually an 8-week block, student teachers are placed in local schools to learn how to integrate theories into practice in real teaching situations. Specifically, I uncover how Joan grappled with the tensions and complexities of teaching young learners from a different cultural and linguistic background, in a small elementary school situated in the borderland between Hong Kong (an autonomous region of China) and Shenzhen (a province of Mainland China).

Critical incidents from Joan's practicum experiences were analysed to uncover how she dealt with the tensions and dilemmas in confronting difference and marginalising practices while learning to teach English as a second language (ESL) in the practicum school. Implications on how to develop initial teacher education programmes so that student teachers learning to teach across cultural contexts can be encouraged to explore, confront and ‘deal with the emotional terrain of understanding difference’ will be discussed (Boler & Zembylas, 2003, p. 123; Zembylas, 2010).

After the handing over of Hong Kong sovereignty from 1997 and under the “one country two systems” model, the Special Administrative Region's Government initiated new policies of civic education and amended or ignored the old ones. However, it was not until May 2011 that the complete new policy paper was introduced for consultation and then it was passed and issued as national education in April 2012. This article aims to analyze the civic education policy of Hong Kong in the transfer of power after the handing over in the following 15 years.

This policy analysis describes the preparations for Hong Kong’s future citizens and masters. Theories of citizenship education are adopted for this analysis. Moreover, theories of the state are also applied for more in‐depth understanding. These concepts are helpful to operationalize the contents of the study. It was a historical and comparative method to help to understand and explain the civic education policy of the HKSAR's governance.

Basically, it can be seen that the policies are anticipatory and responsive. The historical context of Hong Kong helped to make the correspondence with how the government expected to mold its future citizens in order to facilitate and implement their administration and governance.

This paper explores the role of the Hong Kong Government in the initiation and implementation of civic education.

This study investigated the effectiveness of a professional development project on digital citizenship education (DCE) conducted by a team at the Education University of Hong Kong. The project aimed to promote digital citizenship education in local junior secondary schools in Hong Kong and support the professional development of in-service teachers.

This study was based on a departmental knowledge transfer and curriculum development project that provided professional development training workshops to in-service teachers from seven partner schools. This paper analyses some findings from the quantitative research questionnaires, lesson observations and qualitative interviews.

Eleven of the 12 participants reported that they were satisfied with the training workshops in the end. We also conducted paired sample t-tests of inferential data. The results show that after the workshops, the teachers tended to teach their students more about aspects of digital law, digital commerce and digital safety and security when teaching digital citizenship. This selection helps us to better understand the priorities of teachers in teaching digital citizenship.

This paper is the product of an original knowledge transfer and curriculum development project supported by the Education University of Hong Kong in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR) of China. The topic of digital citizenship education has also been under developed since citizenship education has always been about conventional citizenship in the physical world.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the curriculum developments of civic education in three emerging Chinese societies: China and two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao, which are increasingly under the impacts of globalisation in this information world.

The analytical method is used and the following are identified: active and global civic education-related learning units and key themes and main contents in official curriculum guidelines and updated textbooks related to civic education.

A major finding is that elements of both active and global citizenship, such as participation in the community and understanding about the world and thus forming multiple identities, can be found alongside their emphasis on enhancing national citizenship. Thus, ideas of global citizenship and multiple levels of citizenship from local, national to global start to develop in these three Chinese societies.

The implications of such findings of both active and global citizenship, as well as multiple identities, found in these three Chinese societies could be huge for informing civic literature and sociological point of views, in particular, pointing to the next generations receiving a broadened and transcended notion of multiple levels of citizenship, apart from local and national citizenship.

The significance of this paper is that it argues that ideas of active citizenship in terms of community participation and global citizenship have been found in China, Hong Kong and Macao civic education curriculum and textbooks because of the expectations placed on students to compete in a globalized world, though national citizenship and patriotic concerns have been primary concerns. Globalisation makes the world society by impacting on these three Chinese societies for active and global citizenship, though they still retain their particular curricular focusses.

This paper aims to analyse the general trend of a funding scheme of civic education over the past 30 years in terms of the number of projects and the amount of their subsidies, the targeted groups, the content of the activities and the nature of the grantees.

Using statistical data of sponsored projects over three decades and interviews with ten informants.

There has been a shift in the concerns and priorities of these projects. Through the incentives and by setting the themes for funding, the government has regulated the civil society’s involvement with civic education and helped to fashion the officially endorsed values. But it is no longer effective to mediate state–civil society relationship and to cope with the new political scenario.

This paper demonstrates the changing state–civic society relationship over the years with a solid large-scale database. This study advances the knowledge about public funding projects related to citizenship education in particular and sponsorship as a means of governance in general.