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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).

Developing a sense of belonging among immigrant youth in multicultural contexts has attracted significant attention from scholars during the last few decades. Studies have already underscored how various educational factors hinder or facilitate students’ sense of belonging to the school or the larger society. Although most students in Hong Kong schools are ethnic Chinese, a significant number of non-Chinese children make students diversity an essential aspect of schooling. The study investigated how schools can develop a sense of belonging among ethnic minority youth in Hong Kong.

As the education system in Hong Kong lacks a multicultural education policy, how can schools help develop a sense of belonging to the school and the larger society among young ethnic minority people? To answer this question, this paper consolidates the two sets of data originally gathered for two research projects. The data was collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with nine secondary school teachers (Chinese and non-Chinese) and 15 students (non-Chinese) and analysed thematically.

The thematic analysis of the qualitative data identified several challenges and opportunities for developing ethnic minority students’ sense of belonging in Hong Kong.

Researchers in comparative education can further explore how multicultural education and inclusive education approach together can help ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all and cater to students' diverse learning needs across the education systems.

Given that the aims of multicultural education and inclusive education resonate with each other, schools can focus on the Whole School Approach to developing a sense of belonging among ethnic minority youth in Hong Kong. However, policymakers and practitioners may need to adopt a multifaceted perspective on inclusive education that strives to ensure equitable quality education for all.

The study contributes to the existing body of scholarship on multicultural education and inclusive education. The study findings underscore the importance of an interdisciplinary research framework in education and advocate an integrative approach to supporting students with diverse learning needs in multicultural contexts.

This chapter aims to explore the novelty and utility of political economy discourse, termed “neo-statism,” as an analytical lens for comparative research in higher education. Analysis is framed within the context of Hong Kong’s transition from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region under China’s sovereignty, and its shifting academic paradigms from a more or less spontaneous philosophy rooted in liberal capitalist economy to embracing neo-statism, which involves market-conforming and state-sponsored approaches to economic and social restructuring whereby the state regulates higher education in support of national integration and global power projection. The statist regulation depends heavily on its deployment of discursive legitimacy, strategic distribution of resources, organizational synergy, and elite cohesion articulated through higher education policy, research projects, and cross-border academic exchange and cooperation. The Hong Kong case suggests that comparative research in higher education should advance from the methodological aspects of the comparative approach to exploring wider theoretical spectrum, for understanding emerging politico-economic factors shaping academic paradigm in comparative contexts. Moreover, scholars who engage in the trendy internationalization in higher education should move beyond the logics of neo-liberalism, and pay closer attention to the new geopolitical realities that are changing the normative and interactive dimensions of international higher education at large.

Teacher education for social justice aims to enable teachers to work toward equity and justice in society and humanizing the educational experience of their students. Conceptualizing teaching as a political and ethical endeavor, social justice teacher education must engage seriously with the local and lived experiences of both teacher educators and student teachers. How then does teacher education for social justice move across communities and identities, and through cultural, social, geographic and temporal spaces? This chapter presents an autobiographical narrative inquiry into social justice teacher education across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, across time, and within different educational communities. Bakhtin's dialogic theory (1981) helps to trace the narrative threads wherein “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293). The study examines my ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as a critical teacher educator in the context of a youth mentoring service-learning course for undergraduate teacher candidates. I examine the complexities and tensions in exploring experiences and co-constructing understandings of oppression, privilege and social justice with my student teachers on the youth mentoring course in dialogic struggles with my experiences of justice and education in the USA and Hong Kong as an English-speaking Chinese American. Providing an in-depth examination of the convergence of identity, social relations, place, and time in my knowledge formation, I critically reflect upon the notion of social justice to suggest that social justice teacher education is multi-voiced and lived both locally and globally.

While most language departments of the university offer service-learning (SL) subjects based on language teaching, such as “Teaching Chinese as a Second Language in Local Schools” and “Serving the Community through Teaching English,” this paper aims to argue that teaching students to teach language(s) is yet to be the best strategy to serve the service recipients.

SL is widely understood as an experiential learning pedagogy that integrates academic focus, reflection and community service and is shown to be impactful. In Hong Kong, the first university that has made SL a graduation requirement is the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the University). Considering this, new SL courses have proliferated over the past decade. Adopting a narrative inquiry approach, this paper examines personal narratives from a new SL subject aiming to raise awareness of refugees in Hong Kong. The data includes students’ reflective journals, co-created personal narratives and podcasts and semi-structured interviews.

This paper finds that crafting and recording narratives of shared experiences deepens cultural understanding, cultivates empathy and facilitates language learning in a genuine setting.

Ultimately, this paper advocates a well-designed SL that combines language, content and technology as a powerful, transformational experience for both college students and service recipients.

This paper focuses on a brand new SL course, “Storytelling for Understanding: Refugee Children in Hong Kong,” offered in Semester 1, 2022–2023. The subject was developed by the two authors from a language division affiliated to the University. The deliverables were podcast recordings, co-authored and co-edited by the students and the children.

Many master’s students enrol in coursework-based programmes to improve their professional knowledge and skills for the job market. Most studies of employability in higher education focus on undergraduates rather than master’s students, although the number of master’s students worldwide has increased significantly in recent years. This study explores the factors involved in the perceived employability (PE) of master’s students in Hong Kong.

The authors first proposed a conceptual model of PE based on the social cognitive career theory. Using survey data from 786 master’s students in Hong Kong, the authors applied descriptive statistics and an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to address the following research questions: How do master’s students gauge their PE? How do person, learning and environment variables influence the PE of master’s students?

The authors found that PE is influenced by students' approaches to learning and their institutional career support.

Few studies examined whether students' learning experiences during the master’s programmes influence their employability. This study highlights the importance of learning experiences and career support in coursework-based master’s programmes for enhancing graduate employability.

This study analyses the advantages and weaknesses of using Facebook to aid the learning of Japanese as a foreign language.

A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from 100 Hong Kong Japanese language learners (who are generally fluent in Chinese and English), ranging from total amateur to advanced learners (Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) qualified at different levels).

The authors' results suggest that the advantages of using Facebook to help learn Japanese include: (1) serving as a free-of-charge, casual, and convenient learning platform; (2) enriching learners' knowledge beyond the language learning and (3) encouraging interactive and collaborative learning with other users for practicing the language. However, the low credibility and unstructured educational materials posted on Facebook and being easily distracted by other Facebook feeds are the major weaknesses of learning a language through Facebook. Furthermore, the authors' result shows that Facebook is especially effective for Japanese learning when learners fall into either one of the following groups: young, female, or intermediate (N2/3) learners.

Scant studies focus on the aid of learning Japanese via Facebook, especially Hong Kong learners' perceptions, or generally in the East. Therefore, this study aims to fill this research gap. The authors' findings will facilitate the students, teachers, and language institutions from Hong Kong and other countries to improve the students' effectiveness in learning and teaching Japanese.

This study scrutinizes the convergence between commercial advertising and the political vision of social movement in media advertisements. This study deliberates how commercial advertisement could be compatible with movement discourses and social resistance. Such hybridization between commercial narration and movement discourses is different from political advertising sponsored by political and civic organizations. This study uses an advertising campaign in Hong Kong which expressed outcry against police search on an outspoken media as a case study to conceptualize advertising activism with the thematic analysis of the movement discourses shown in printed advertisements. This study aims to engage with scholarly dialogue surrounding social movement studies and discuss how movement discourses could hybridize with commercial advertisement.

This study examines the discourses and textual features of an advertising campaign initiated by the public instead of political elites and social movement organizations in Hong Kong, in which various individual citizens, anonymous participants, business enterprises and civic organizations expressed their anger over a police search against an outspoken media (Apple Daily) by Hong Kong police. This bottom-up advertising campaign shows how the narration of commercial advertising could be hybridized with the activism for social resistance, which is conceptualized as advertising activism in this paper.

Based on the textual features and discourses embedded in the advertisements, this study investigates the printed advertisements mushroomed in Apple Daily since the police search in August 2020 by the thematic analysis under the concept of advertising activism: frame construction, identities mobilization and decentered solidarity. Advertising activism differs from commercial and political advertising from two ways. Firstly, its advertisements are cosponsored by numerous nonpolitically well-known individuals or organizations. Secondly, advertising activism feature with hybridization between commercial narration and political or movement discourses. Discourses of advertising activism aim to mobilize the commercial identity of consumers for noncommercial means by their consumption behaviors.

The findings illustrate a hybridization of commercial narration and movement discourses stemming from social movement and identity politics, which is coined by our conceptualization of advertising activism. While commercial and political advertising focus on business promotion and political messages, respectively, advertising activism demonstrates multiple layers of cultural meanings on the consumption behaviors which hybridize with political and movement discourses. The authors hope this study could unleash further intellectual dialogue on the social role of advertising in social movement and how movement discourses “spillover” from social events to the commercial advertisement.

This study analyzes how the notion of the people emerged in two (neo)liberal societies during the crisis in 2019: Hong Kong and Chile.

From a qualitative and comparative perspective, 131 middle-class individuals were interviewed during heightened contentious activity in Hong Kong and Chile. The interviews were analyzed based on Ruiz's model for sociological discourse analysis.

The study shows that in contexts strongly influenced by liberalism, the notion of “people” is not advertised antagonistically against the individual but as complementary, and to this end, it emphasizes the heterogeneity of repertoires or demands. The comparison of these two movements highlighted the importance of democratic institutions in shaping the outcomes and effectiveness of protests.

Enacting the National Security Law in Hong Kong and the mandatory blockade imposed by both governments in response to the COVID-19 pandemic required an adaptation in the design and execution of the interviews, adopting a hybrid format. The volatility that characterizes periods of political crisis requires longitudinal follow-up. This article does not capture but can be explored in associated research publications.

The research offers two significant contributions: it addresses the immediate context by conducting on-site research during the most significant contemporary crises in Hong Kong and Chile. Secondly, it problematizes the understanding of the people in liberal societies and proposes it as a complementary (and not antagonistic) concept to that of the individual.

This study explored the mathematical dispositions of Hong Kong mathematics pre-service teachers (PSTs). It also constructed a mathematical disposition framework comprising their affective, cognitive and functional dispositions towards the subject.

Thirty-one participants completed three structured metaphor tasks and one open-ended metaphor task in which they shared their views on mathematics. Responses were examined qualitatively and quantitatively. Coding based on thematic analysis was utilized to summarize the specific contents of the mathematical dispositions expressed by the PSTs, and a 5-level scoring scale was employed to evaluate the strength of the dispositions as represented by different metaphor types.

The findings suggest that the mathematical dispositions of pre-service mathematics teachers were generally positive. However, the overall level was not high. The most prevalent metaphors used to describe mathematics were “rice”, “blue” and “dog”.

Hong Kong mathematics PSTs' mathematical dispositions are examined by using metaphorical tasks. Three categories are identified: affective, cognitive and functional dispositions towards mathematics.

This study has proposed an original framework for describing mathematical disposition.