This paper reports on a hermeneutic phenomenological study on the experiences of visual arts teachers teaching students with intellectual disabilities in Hong Kong. Themes which emerged from the interviews were examined in conjunction with the lived experiences of the teachers. Special school visual arts teachers who participated in this study have strong emotional and personal connections with their students. The teachers had experienced difficulties when teaching their students and many of the problems were unique to the special school settings. In an effort to tackle these problems and improve their teaching, these teachers engaged in reflection and explored a variety of ways to enhance their students' learning. In spite of the practical learning problems their students face, the teachers maintained that studying visual arts is beneficial to their students 'whole-person development. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on the nature of teaching visual arts to students with intellectual disabilities.
[Copyright © 2015 Australian Association of Special Education Inc.]

Music listening occupies a central part of music studies at all levels of education. However, according to the relevant research, teachers have been emphasizing students’ cognitive responses with limited connection to the affective domain during. Undergraduate music majors have little interest in those teaching materials chosen by their teachers. This study is based on motivation theory, which emphasizes cognitive and affective responses during the learning process as well as requiring teachers to understand students’ behaviors, thoughts and feelings. The aim of this study is to investigate and explore teachers’ beliefs and pedagogies toward students’ affective responses during music listening in higher education under the context of mainland China and Hong Kong. The following two research questions guide the whole study: a) what are university music teachers’ beliefs and pedagogies toward affective response during music listening and learning in higher education? (b) How do their teaching pedagogy represent their belief? This study uses a mixed-method approach and includes two phases. Phase I aims to investigate the current situation regarding teachers’ belief and pedagogy towards affective responses while listening and learning to music. A questionnaire surveyed the views of 185 university music teachers recruited from 17 universities in mainland China, together with ten university music teachers from two universities in Hong Kong. From the questionnaire survey findings, three major issues were identified by teachers and considered critical to informing their beliefs and pedagogies when teaching music: (1) the correlation between teachers’ beliefs and pedagogy, (2) perspectives and pedagogic strategies toward affective response in music listening and learning, and (3) the factors influence teachers’ beliefs and pedagogies. Phase II aims to explore what the teachers’ actually teaching and the influences upon teachers’ belief and pedagogy towards affective responses

Critical thinking is regarded as a higher-order thinking skill, which is important in developing a comprehensive competency in modern times. Nurturing children’s critical thinking at an early stage thus becomes an essential target that should be pursued by all school teachers. Facing such a trend, the Education Bureau of Hong Kong started to reform the school curriculum in 2000 in order to develop students’ generic skills through eight Key Learning Areas (KLA), one of which is Arts Education that includes Music. Nine generic skills, including critical thinking, have been identified that should be nurtured through all KLAs. Published in 2003, the Music Curriculum Guide (Curriculum and Development Council, 2003) proposed four learning targets for music. Among all, cultivating critical responses in music is the target achieved by the integrated learning activities of creating, performing and listening. Nevertheless, there are very limited studies investigating the extent to which current primary music teachers can nurture students’ critical thinking in Hong Kong. Furthermore, Hong Kong music teachers may not be capable of developing students’ critical thinking through these integrated activities. This study aims to examine the current situation of cultivating critical thinking in music in Hong Kong’s primary schools and explore how critical thinking skills can be effectively developed. A questionnaire, interviews and class observation were used to collect data for current situation of nurturing critical thinking skills in primary music lessons. The results of the study demonstrate a positive indication of the acceptance of and beliefs in the implementation of critical thinking skills in Hong Kong primary teachers. Difficulties are found that impeded the effectiveness of the implementation, namely, teachers’ professional commitments by using critical thinking skills, teachers’ understanding of and abilities for the implementation, students’ involvement and differentiation

Hong Kong has publicly declared its intention, via its cultural policy, of becoming an international cultural metropolis. This has been matched, on the part of its educational reforms, by a commitment aimed at ensuring that students are fully prepared to meet the multifarious work and life challenges of the future. Forming a potential bridge between the two sectors is arts education, formally recognised as fostering the necessary skills of appreciation, creativity and expression and of enriching the cultural literacy of individuals and society, thereby providing the soil, nutrition and impetus for cultural development. This study adopted the analogy of cultural policy and arts education policy as the two wings of the same bird which, when working in unison, have the power to yield rewards at both a sectoral and at a stakeholder level through the occurrence of mutually-beneficial synergies, in order to investigate the degree to which this was presently taking place. Via an ecological research perspective characterised by a focus on the layers of interconnectedness and interrelatedness among the various stakeholders within and across Hong Kong’s cultural and arts education sectors, the methodology drew on the salient features of both the “ecological worldview” and the “interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary” types to more fully understand perceptions as they related to the policies’ fundamental elements of “conceptualisation”, “communication” and “operationalisation”. As a means of answering the three research questions guiding the study, the data gathering and analysis stage was concerned with the collection of the relevant policy documentation, an online cultural and arts education policy questionnaire, and a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The findings revealed that while evidence exists of a variety of intra- and inter-sectoral partnerships, this is not being matched by a strategic vision at a policymaking level that clearly demonstrates how such collaborations

Following the return of sovereignty to China in 1997, education reform in Hong Kong has been initiated and implemented on a massive scale. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government has made a concerted effort to improve the quality of education through the reforms, a point witnessed by the creation of a number of different policies and strategies over the course of the past decade. This chapter reviews the music curriculum reforms of 2002, and examines how education policy has impacted on school practices as a result. In the process, various issues, including the place of music in the school curriculum, assessment for learning, the motivation to learn, the nurturing of creativity, and the balance between Western and Chinese culture, are all examined.

Art education in Hong Kong has undergone various changes in response to educational reform. In art assessment, a major change in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum is the inclusion of art criticism as a compulsory component of the new public examination. Assessing students’ abilities to interpret art in an art criticism public examination context is a critical issue in Hong Kong because the new senior secondary curriculum and assessment has brought attention to the role of written language in the art examination paper. This means the examination assesses not only students’ abilities to interpret art, but also their language abilities required to respond to art in written form. Since this new mode of assessment of art criticism has been published a number of issues have appeared. Recent studies show that teachers and students perceive this development negatively and they believe that the written format will assess students’ written language abilities rather than their critical abilities. These findings challenge the justification of the new art assessment policy and raise questions about the role of written language in responding to art. This article aims to raise the issue of the marriage between language and art criticism in the Hong Kong public examination context. It argues and examines the relationship of language to art interpretation, reasoning in the assessment, and issues in the public art criticism examination context. The issues addressed in this article provide opportunities for researchers and policy makers to reconsider and refine the new form of examination.
[Copyright © 2017 The Author. Ijade © 2017 NSEAD/John Wiley & Sons Ltd.]

This study investigates how a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s secondary school teacher developed and implemented global citizenship education by adapting a spiral teaching model of empathy, experiential learning and classroom-based inquiry learning activities in two teaching cycles. One key aim of Hong Kong’s education reform is to prepare students for challenges in a globalization age. This case study used action research on two different cohorts of about 36 students in two school years’ teaching cycles (2013–2014 and 2014–2015). The students were taught by a secondary school teacher with an aim of cultivating their empathy through experiential learning in authentic contexts. The author participated as a researcher who observed and facilitated the evaluation. The learning topic is ‘understanding poverty’ in this interdisciplinary junior secondary PSHE subject. The findings reveal that through an adaptation of empathy learning model, even junior secondary school students can develop perspective-taking empathy with experiential learning and classroom-based inquiry learning activities. Also, whereas the first teaching cycle started with experiencing different contexts of poverty before having classroom inquiry learning activities, the second teaching cycle started with exposing students to multiple quantitative and narrative descriptions of poverty and to investigate stories of those affected by poverty before having experiential learning of different contexts of poverty. There was a higher level of empathy by those students who were exposed to prior background and conceptual understanding before engaging in authentic learning. But the two cohorts of students could achieve the learning objectives of seeing through others’ perspectives, making imagined connections between their lives and the lives of others who are less fortunate, linking the local and the global by analyzing how the global economic restructuring affects the local lives, and fostering their willingness

The purpose of the chapter is to review the past and present situation of teaching musicianship in Hong Kong schools as a background, identify a number of current issues, and propose a number of paradigm shifts that seem to be taking place in Hong Kong at the turn of this new century. In doing so, the chapter not only provides a general historical overview of how Hong Kong school music has traditionally been taught with implications for present practice, but, more importantly, attempts to draw implications on the development of musicianship skills that need to be considered by present day teachers and educational planners alike.
[Copyright © 2003 the author.]