From 2009 to 2011, the authors launched the Basic Law Education Project: Education for Human Rights and the Rule of Law in Hong Kong. This article focuses on a subset of the overarching data-set and discusses the findings that resulted from a comparative analysis of two participating schools. A survey was deployed to assess the extent to which a human rights friendly ethos existed in several institutions. Randomly selected students and all teachers from both schools were invited to participate. The collected data revealed noteworthy trends in mean scores between teachers and students in areas such as equal and fair treatment; protection of and appeal for rights; and feelings of being loved, respected, and blessed. School mission and leadership style appeared to account for significant differences. Additionally, we offer recommendations for practices that may improve human rights ethos in schools.
[Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis.]

公民能力的教育是現時公民教學的教育重點，非正規課程的教育愈見重要。香港學校的公民教育隨著2001年《課程發展路向》報告書的發表，在公民教學的策略上，學校改變過往知識學習的路向，提倡 “學習者為中心” 和 “生活事件” 的教學。學校生活實踐的教育，如學生會的選舉參與和組織活動等，逐漸成為公民教育的重要媒介。我們透過對學生在學校學生會的活動參與情況的探討，嘗試檢視學校非正規課程學習的優點和局限。我們從訪問學生的個案中，發現公民學習在教學方法和施行方面，存在問題，影響學習成效。

The teaching profession, similar to other human service occupations, requires recruits to have a strong sense of social responsibility, as their commitment is to help their students to become better citizens. Success in recruiting qualified and committed teachers, nevertheless, depends on whether the teaching career is attractive to quality and motivated young people. This paper reports a quantitative and qualitative study of the perceptions of teaching as a career by graduates from twenty secondary schools with different backgrounds in Hong Kong. It analyzed the relationship of the characteristics of these students with their interest in teaching, and examined the factors which may have influenced their choice of teaching as a career. It is hoped that the findings of the study could increase our understanding of young people's perceptions of a teaching career in different societies, and help policy makers adopt more effective measures to increase the attractiveness of teaching to qualified school leavers.

Fieldwork in its various forms is a widely advocated approach to the study of a number of school subjects in both the primary and lower secondary levels. It is generally believed that fieldwork helps students to have a deeper understanding of subject matter through direct and first-hand experience of phenomena and processes in their natural settings. Moreover, in some schools, outdoor education programmes are also organized with the objective of fostering the personal development of the students. However, previous research (Lai, 1996) revealed that most lower secondary geography students did not have any field study experience. It is likely that similar experiences provided by other subjects are minimal. Fieldwork has been seen as an expensive form of activity in terms of time, discipline and safety risks, which has inhibited many schools from organizing outdoor educational experiences for their students. Most of these experiences are limited to students choosing a limited number of school subjects in their post-compulsory years. A qualitative case study of the experiences of Secondary Four students in a school in Hong Kong was conducted before, during and after a geography field trip. The purpose is to understand what the students actually experience in the fieldwork programme and their interactions with their prior experience in the lower forms. The results reveal that the students' intent before the trip and their learning experiences after the trip were much richer than what their teachers had intended. Despite some students' negative experiences of previous field trips, there was a universally strong desire to be outside the boredom and constraints of the classroom. Field trips were cherished for their rarity and freedom and the field sites were sought for their novelty. Both teachers and students reported improved teacher-student relations and positive behavioural changes among the students. The field trip has also been a valuable educational experience for the

In Hong Kong, the move towards quality education has stirred up waves of changes in the education setting in the late 90s. Drastic changes have been implemented in terms of curriculum, methodology and forms of school management. Borrowed heavily from the Western democracies, the contemporary educational policy and practice in Hong Kong are increasingly directed by the market model of educational provision valuing consumer choice; accountability; quality assurance; devolution of authority and participative management process. In the face of these changes, three issues are pertinent to school leadership - Firstly, the approaches towards School-based Management stress the importance of school heads to work closely with the various stakeholders who may have different and often conflicting role expectations on their school heads. Role incumbents may find themselves confused when determining framework of defined outcomes and accountability. Secondly, the injection of consumer control into school operation and the marketisation of educational provision denote the need of school heads to have a deeper understanding of the needs, expectations and aspirations of the various stakeholders directly or indirectly involved in school management. Thirdly, increasing demands for school heads to seek professional development opportunities that will broaden their existing knowledge and increase their array of management skills to cope with the current changes. While research literature is enormous on the studies of role expectations and job aspirations of school heads especially from the perspective of teachers, parents and even heads themselves, however, there is a lack of robust research locally and abroad on the perspective of the neglected and yet the most directly involved stakeholder - the students. The present study attempts to develop understanding of the role expectations of primary school heads as viewed from the students' perspective and to identify the effects of such expectations

Each year in Hong Kong, only about 50% of Secondary Five students (age 16+) can pass the Hong Kong Certificate of Education (HKCEE), which is the threshold qualification for any further pursuit of education or employment. There has been concern for those who did not survive conventional schooling. Recent studies on education have increasingly emphasized life-long learning in the community. For students to be able to continue learning throughout their life, the development of appropriate generic skills is believed to be vital. An innovative continuing education programme known as Project Yi Jin (PYJ) was introduced by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government for those students who failed in the HKCEE. PYJ provides an alternative pathway for students to obtain a formal qualification equivalent to HKCEE. Instead of using the mainstream curriculum for secondary school, PYJ adopts a holistic approach in curriculum design, aiming at developing students’ generic skills. It is expected that students will acquire and develop certain skills that are generic enough to enable them to cope with personal, social and career development. A total of 2,806 students who attended PYJ responded to 13 survey items about their generic skills before PYJ (Time 1) and 13 parallel items after PYJ (Time 2). Principal components analysis found three dimensions of generic skills, viz., Cognitive, Academic, and Affective dimensions before PYJ and three parallel dimensions after PYJ. Repeated-measures analysis of variance found that the students scored significantly higher in each of the three dimensions in Time 2 than in Time 1. There was evidence of enhanced generic skills through PYJ. Whereas there was support for the effectiveness of PYJ, the findings also call for attention to the importance of generic skills in the curriculum of primary and secondary schools.