In September 1997, shortly after China resumed sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Education Department announced a policy which was widely seen as a restoration of 'mother-tongue education', but which, in reality, was an elitist language selection policy. This policy, which provided for the selection of the best primary school graduates for monolingual education in English, was designed to be a cost-effective way of training in English skills for those who had the economic and cultural capital to benefit from it. Meanwhile, the majority of students were barred from sufficient exposure to English, the language of power and wealth. In this paper, I shall show that this policy draws on a strong utilitarian discourse about the centrality of English for the economic survival of Hong Kong, which was engineered by business interests on the eve of the changeover in 1997, and which helped perpetuate a form of linguistic imperialism. Meanwhile, academics whose research was used to legitimize the policy, failed to problematize dominant language ideologies that have been used to justify pedagogically unsound practices and an inequitable language streaming policy. Through documenting the voices of individual educators, I am able to delineate counter-discourses which, albeit weak and isolated, nevertheless manifested much broader educational concerns than the narrow utilitarianism and the unquestioned privileging of the learning of English skills that underlay the current policy.
[Copyright of Journal of Education Policy is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0268093032000145917]

The idea of active learning was first introduced to kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong in 1981 when they received their in-service teacher education. In a two-year, school-based project, 60 teachers in five schools were asked to create collaborative videos about models of good practices after sharing "effective" teaching episodes with peer teachers who were experimenting with "desirable" learning activities in their classrooms. This study reports on the planning, implementation, classroom ethos and adult support displayed in the project deliverables (videos) so as to portray the kinds of emergent innovations that were being adopted. The findings of the study suggest that there was some significance to the use of collaborative reflection to activate teachers' creativity and sensitivity in giving children's learning first priority in their pedagogy. As well, it points toward using collaborative reflection as an element of teacher education.
[Copyright of Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10901020701634864]

A review and analysis of the research literature on teachers' classroom use of approval/praise and disapproval/reprimand is provided in an attempt to determine the extent to which teachers typically employ praise in their classroom teaching. There is a considerable degree of agreement across the studies reviewed, carried out in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and St Helena, regarding the ways in which teachers typically deploy approval and disapproval, with some interesting variations. There is little evidence to suggest that teachers, universally, systematically deploy contingent praise as positive reinforcement in spite of the considerable literature testifying to its effectiveness. In particular, praise for appropriate classroom social behaviour is only rarely observed.
[Copyright of Educational Psychology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713663753 ]

In Hong Kong and Canada, indeed globally, slogans about learning to learn and teaching for 21st-century knowledge and skills are common. However, there are few examples of how teacher education courses or programs are responding to these new demands. In this paper, we propose a framework for designing teacher education premised on the theoretical perspective of knowledge building. We describe two courses, a pre-service teacher education in course Hong Kong teachers and a joint graduate course for Hong Kong and Canadian teachers. In both cases, participants engaged in knowledge-building discourse mediated by a computer-supported learning environment. We present the design and illustrate how the teachers were able to work as collaborative inquirers and knowledge creators in a knowledge-building community. Implications of knowledge building for teacher development as related to socio-cultural contexts are discussed.
[Copyright of Teaching Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10476210500527907]