Under intensified pressures for improving the global competence of university graduates, national governments across different parts of the globe have to on the one hand expand higher education enrolments and on the other hand assure high quality in teaching and research in order to make sure their higher education systems can compete globally. Many Asian states have been in the forefront of this effort to improve national competitiveness by raising their higher education enrolment rate. As state financing and provision alone will not satisfy the growing demands for higher education, governments in Asia adopt more pro-competition policy instruments and increasingly look to the market/private sectors in running higher education. Therefore the private higher education sector has paid for much of the higher education sector expansion, leading to revolutionary changes and imparting a growing 'privateness' to Asian higher education systems. This article sets out in this wider socio-economic context to examine the rise of transnational higher education in three Asian societies: Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. With particular reference to examining how the growing prominence of privateness in higher education has challenged the conventional education governance models, this article critically examines how these Asian states have reinvented their regulatory regimes to govern the growing complexity and highly contested public-private mix in higher education.
[Copyright of Pacific Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09512740801990220]

Nearly every school in Hong Kong claims to provide ethics/religious education as part of the curriculum, but teachers find it difficult to teach values and attitudes without having students find ethics/religious lessons boring. While much has been said about how students learn, it remains that it is the teacher s task to provide the relevant experience and conditions for learning so that learning takes place. Thus such questions arise as, What is relevant experience? and What do students experience? Since most students are exposed to popular culture, the use of it as examples in teaching ethics/religious education may be a solution. This research finds that teachers and students in general enjoy the use of popular culture in the teaching and learning of ethics/religious education. The problems lie with the lack of resources and the already too heavy workload of teachers.
[Copyright of Religious Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00344080308292 ]

Viewing education as a complex site for endorsing and contesting knowledges and practices we explore its critical roles in feminist language planning. Many types of language planning have relied heavily on education for the implementation and spread of the particular reform agenda largely reliant on discourses of compulsory obligation (e.g. spelling reforms). The scenario of feminist language planning reveals that education is not a mere external agent of implementation but central to the raising of awareness or provoking an 'Initiating Trajectory' (Winter & Pauwels, 2003). However, the implementation of gender-inclusive practices ('Trajectories of Practices') in education highlights contexts of conflict (and confusion) about grammatical prescriptions and social reform (Pauwels & Winter, 2006). In this paper we probe the adoption, problematisation and invigoration of 'Agency Trajectories' in (language) educators' narratives and classroom practices. Our investigation includes educators operating in diverse English-language communities (e.g. Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong).
[Copyright of Current Issues in Language Planning is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/cilp093.0 ]

In this age of new media, children are exposed to media messages at an early age. What can we do when the mass media exert such a great influence on children? One proposal has been for the introduction of a new school subject: media education. Though media education has not been part of the official curriculum in Hong Kong, some schools, both primary and secondary, have tried it out. This paper argues for the desirability of introducing media education in primary schools in Hong Kong, with regard to social change, recent education reform and learning initiatives of primary pupils. It then draws on the findings of a study conducted in a local primary school to examine the views of pupils, parents, and teachers on the effects on pupils of the implementation of media education lessons and campus radio projects in this age of new media.
[Copyright of Educational Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03055690500237033]