The creation of bay areas is one way to develop economies and culture based on natural characteristics and regional connections; successful examples include the San Francisco, New York and Tokyo Bay Areas. In 2019, China established the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA). As a result of historical and geographical factors, the GBA is uniquely characterised by being subject to ‘one country, two systems’, ‘three customs territories’, and ‘three legal systems’. This study offered ample empirical evidence based on qualitative methods referring to in-depth interviews with academics and managers as well as publicly available policies and literature in the GBA. A thematic analysis was used to explore the context and characteristics of developing higher education (HE) in the GBA. The study emphasised that developing GBA’s HE improved its partnerships from co-operation to strategic co-ordination to resource sharing. This research contributes to HE and its governance in the GBA, a topic on which there is limited information in the extant international research literature. It is also useful to policymakers and scholars as it provides potential strategies and insights regarding the development of regional higher education. © The Author(s) 2023.

Publication pressure is perceived to be filtering down into doctoral education worldwide. We explore the causes and effects of the perceived centrality of publishing among doctoral students, emphasising the impact of publication pressure on students’ identity trajectories. We draw on a qualitative analysis of 90 mainland Chinese doctoral students at universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau. We find that the credentialisation of publications in the increasingly competitive and publication-dominant academic labour market results in publishing-centred doctoral journeys. Our key finding is that the centrality of publishing affects every aspect of identity trajectory development: it causes doctoral students to commodify knowledge production, devalues coursework, conference participation, and teaching assistantships, encourages students to regard their supervisors as publishing facilitators and their peers as rivals rather than collaborators, and marginalises engagement with external stakeholders. In discussing these dimensions, we emphasise the need for a more comprehensive evaluation of candidates’ abilities and honours in academic recruitment and call for policies to curtail the overemphasis on research output in academic evaluations. © 2022 Society for Research into Higher Education.

Awareness of culturally diverse young people’s rights and needs to sexuality education has been raised internationally. However, existing literature has generally focused more on how culturally diverse young people navigate western mainstream societies, leaving the Asian context underexamined. This paper explores the experiences and views of South Asian minority youth of sexuality education at home and in school in Hong Kong, informed by rights-based and cultural competence perspectives of sexuality education, and using a qualitative descriptive methodology. The findings identified four themes: (1) the double silence experienced at home and school; (2) marriage within the same religion and caste; (3) gender role expectations to be caring women and protective men, and (4) the need for culturally targeted sexuality education. This paper contributes to scholarship on sexuality education by advancing the knowledge base by means of a case study conducted in Hong Kong, an Asian multicultural context that differs from western multicultural societies. It elucidates the meaning of cultural sensitivity and cultural competence by stressing the negotiability of cultural norms and taboos and identifying the practical implications for conducting sexuality education in a multicultural city like Hong Kong. © 2022 Informa UK Limited.

This study aimed to examine university students’ perceptions of teacher care overall and in the three constructs of pedagogical care, holistic care and relational care, to consider their inclusion in quality enhancement models. Quantitative research using self-administrated online survey was conducted with undergraduates in Hong Kong, Macau, Republic of Fiji, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. Based on the descriptive and paired-sample t -test analyses, empirical results have shown that university students perceived teacher care as important. They ascribed the highest importance to relational care, followed by pedagogical care and holistic care. This research advocates recognising the importance of teacher care in university education and integrating it into higher education pedagogy. This article proposes a caring quality mechanism for enhancing teaching quality, to address the inadequacy of the audit-focused quality system. © 2022 Informa UK Limited.

This study highlights the role of educators in the resistance to Hong Kong's National Security Education (NSE) amidst waves of political repression in the wake of the anti-extradition movement of 2019-2020. Education reforms, teacher training and student assessment used to cultivate students' creativity, critical thinking and independent thinking skills. NSE, which emphasises China's perspective of knowledge construction, has contradicted long-standing pedagogies of teaching and learning. The research questions are: How do politically liberal educators navigate these changes? Do they conform and/or resist? Based on the study of social media and interviews with 22 politically liberal former and current teachers, school librarians, educators in public organisations and professors of teacher training programmes, I find that beneath the public transcripts of compliance in schools, there is a repertoire of 'winning quietly' among educators in Hong Kong by training students' 'civil society competence' using less politically sensitive issues, working perfunctorily on NSE-related tasks, using metaphors, jokes and prayers to convey hidden messages, and allowing students to engage in resistance. Classrooms and private online groups remain the third space for atomised resistance. Outside Hong Kong, educators openly counter the ideological influence under NSE both individually and collectively, enabling an alternative to NSE that can reach students in Hong Kong. This study illuminates that authoritarian governments never fully control the stage, and it is too soon to tell whether their attempts to create obedient citizens will prevail. Copyright ©2023 Sage Publications Ltd.

This case study explored how the principles of multicultural and intercultural education are reflected in a minority-majority Hong Kong secondary school (that is, a school where most students are ethnic minorities). The findings suggest that the school illustrates several aspects of multicultural and intercultural education, especially content integration, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and democratic deliberation, particularly in relation to school-based material, teacher sensitivity, and dialogical reasoning. The main hurdles discovered are language learning difficulties and an unsupportive social environment. This study contributes to literature on the development of multicultural and intercultural education in Hong Kong and offers directions for generalizable future research. Copyright © 2023 Peicong MA et al.

This paper examines international students’ intercultural experiences during an online course on global media education that was co-organised in 2021 and 2022 by universities in Lapland, Finland and Hong Kong, China. The COVID-19 pandemic started an exponential ascent for teaching and learning in online environments. This is likely to continue in the globalising post-pandemic world, in which the participants are becoming increasingly international and from diverse backgrounds. For positive online intercultural encounters, online pedagogies that enhance intercultural understanding and the development of intercultural communication skills are needed. Through a content analysis of the students’ learning diaries, this paper investigates the ways in which cultural diversity was experienced during online teaching and learning and how the students’ perceptions and cultural sensitivity developed during the courses. The findings are reflected in the five pillars of the online pedagogical framework, which is then expanded to encompass the dimension of intercultural communication to support the development of intercultural sensitivity and interrelationships among students. We propose a pedagogical model for online teaching and learning in intercultural contexts that can support equity and quality in e-learning, or so-called e-quality. This paper concludes by recommending international collaborative teaching in authentic situations for the promotion of intercultural understanding and communication. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The rapid propagation of the International Baccalaureate (IB) in the East and Southeast Asian region, together with the continuing globalisation of education, has generated implementational opportunities and challenges for teachers within the IB network of schools. Based on semi-structured interviews with teachers and school leaders across 15 IB Diploma Programme (DP) schools within the three milieus of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, the study explored how DP's expansion fuelled ambiguities and inconsistencies in programme policy, which impacted on professional cultures and assessments. The analysis highlights the overreliance on the voluntary contribution of teachers and external examiners in supporting professional development and assessments as well as the connection of assessments to anxiety and dissonance in teachers. Copyright ©2023 Routledge.

Although young people want to know more about sexuality, they do not feel they have received what they need to learn. In Chinese societies, scant research has solicited direct input from the youth to obtain their views on sexuality education (SE) deliverables. We found research gaps in the lack of Chinese preteens' input regarding SE timing, knowledge perception, learning readiness, and preteens' reasons for obtaining information about sexual health. In Hong Kong, a not-for-profit agency collected data from Chinese preadolescents who expressed opinions through a general survey. This agency surveyed students from 24 primary schools and provided anonymous secondary data for this team to analyze further. Among 4569 fifth- and sixth-grade students (average 11 years old), girls were more likely than boys to seek sex-related information from teachers, library books, and mothers. In contrast, boys were more likely than girls to obtain information from friends, pornographic comics, and the internet. Logistic regression analysis indicated that gender, age, instructional sources, openness to sexual health knowledge, and perceived and actual levels of knowledge predicted preteens' desire to receive SE earlier in grade school. Girls and older students were significantly more likely to report their preference to receive SE in an earlier grade. We recommend that preteens and their parents be encouraged to collaborate with teachers to participate in school-based SE programming. Copyright © 2023 Springer Nature.

To advance the implementation of civic education curriculum, understanding what young people perceive as a "good citizen" is of great importance. The current study takes a quantitative approach to analyse the results of three civic education studies conducted by The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1999, 2009, and 2016, while combining the results of qualitative in-depth interviews with Hong Kong students, to explore the changes in Hong Kong students' perceptions of the "good citizen" since the handover. The study found that the changes in Hong Kong students' understanding of the "good citizen" have followed an "inverted-V" (rising in the beginning and then subsequently falling) trend. It is largely a reflection of debate between pro-democracy and pro-China camps under Hong Kong' hybrid regime. Copyright © 2023 Routledge.