In July 2010, the State Council of the People's Republic of China published an Outline for National Educational Development with a strong conviction to transform China from an economic power into a country of "soft power" and "strength in human resources". In order to realize such a policy goal, the Chinese government has attempted to review its current education policies and systems to initiate reforms to promote innovation and creativity in education. One of the major reform directions is to foster more collaboration between educational institutions in Mainland China with overseas partners, including institutions from the Greater China region (Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau). Despite the noble policy goals set out by the Chinese government in asserting its soft power through the transformations to be introduced to its education systems and the proposal to engage in international collaborations, many citizens in the Mainland, especially the children of migrant (peasant) workers, are currently confronted with insufficient provision of education. This article critically examines issues confronting peasant worker children's education, with particular reference to the most recent policies and strategies adopted by the governments in Mainland China to deal with the growing educational demands from migrant workers' children. This article will also discuss policy implications for the Chinese government which has failed to deliver quality education to children of peasant workers when China is seeking to become a country strong in human resources.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2011.594248]

A recent review of research identified two Asian societies that represented 'positive outliers' in the production of published knowledge on educational leadership and management: Hong Kong and Israel. These were the only Asian societies that had produced a critical mass of publications in this field in international journals over the past two decades. The current study examined the nature of the publication corpus from Hong Kong and Israel in an effort to understand factors that may have contributed to this capacity for high research productivity. The results suggested that different strategies may have accounted for research capacity development in these two societies. Directions are identified for future research.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2014.934780]

This study, conducted over a one-year period, examined the collaboration practices in a large-scale school-university capacity-building collaborative action research project that was designed to help English language teachers develop the skills needed to deal with the reforms to assessment practices in Hong Kong's school curriculum. The study theorized collaboration as a complex construction that must be understood in the context of the prevailing ideologies shaping professional development practices for teachers. Online data generated from the collaborative action research project were analysed to explore the discursive construction of interpersonal relationships. Critical discourse analysis was used to examine the discursive strategies that were used in the emails of two university researchers and two school teachers to negotiate and manage collaboration practices. It examined the complexities of negotiating collaboration as a social practice in institutional cultures in a non-Western sociocultural setting. The implications of the findings for policy, professional development and future research are discussed.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2014.906386]

One of the challenges facing Hong Kong schools is the growing cultural diversity of the student population that is a result of the growing number of ethnic minority students in the schools. This study uses semi-structured interviews with 12 American, Canadian, Indian, Nepalese and Pakistani teachers working in three secondary schools in the public sector to examine how school teachers are handling this challenge. The study uses these interviews to establish a model for the creation of culturally responsive environments that may help to improve the academic performance and promote the personal growth of students in Hong Kong's secondary schools. Five aspects of cultural responsiveness are identified: conceptualising cosmopolitanism, raising sensitivity to ?minor acts of racism?, managing the diverse learning needs of students, promoting a deep understanding of cultural values and helping students deal with the challenges of trilingualism. This study argues that ethnic minority teachers are engaged in a continuing cross-cultural process through which they make sense of the cultural diversity of students and re-learn their own beliefs and practices. The implications for the creation of a culturally responsive environment are also presented.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2013.823379]

Classroom experience is shaped by a number of factors. In this paper, we report a classroom observation study in China, illustrating regional variation in students' classroom learning experiences. Through comparing and contrasting observed classroom practices in three different regions in China (Chongqing, Hong Kong and Shanghai), the paper provides an analysis of the variation in classroom learning experiences of primary school students in China. Our empirical classroom observation data illustrates some key differences in the pedagogy, the use of classroom activities, and the implementation of the curriculum between individual schools. More substantial differences in classroom practices are found when comparing schools from different regions than those within a given city, leading us to conclude that regional impacts on student experience appear to be more important than within-city factors such as the location of a school or its level of facilities.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2013.860005]

Short-term international experience programmes are a common element of English second language (ESL) teacher education in many countries. This study problematizes the belief that such programmes necessarily result in beneficial changes in pre-service teachers thinking about themselves as teachers - their beliefs, habits, and values - by exploring the experiences of eight pre-service ESL teachers from Hong Kong as they undertook a short-term international experience programme in Australia. Drawing on a theory of identity construction, the findings suggest that identity conflicts impacted how the student teachers experienced this programme as they struggled to reconcile past, present, and future trajectories of teacher identity. In particular, the student teachers constructed rigid divisions between different types of teachers and teaching they experienced at home and abroad. These divisions were reflected in antagonistic relations between the types of English language teachers and teaching they aligned their own teaching activities and practices with and the teacher identities that they perceived to be available to them within the Hong Kong education system. Implications for addressing such identity conflicts throughout international experience programmes are considered and implications for future research are discussed.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2011.566997]

Hong Kong's population has increased by around one million per decade from the end of World War II till the 1990s. A large proportion of this growth came from the mass influx of migrants from Mainland China, and the children born to them. During the 1960s and 1970s when Hong Kong's economy was booming rapidly, career advancement opportunities were abundant even for the less educated migrants and their children. But when the economic restructuring occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, trades such as manufacturing and construction sectors, where a large number of workers with migration background were employed, were hit most hardly. The problem of the intergenerational transmission of poverty and low social mobility has now become the focus in the agenda of poverty alleviation. This article aims to use a subsample of the 2006 By-Census dataset to explore whether children with migration background from Mainland China were generally disadvantaged in their educational attainment and income. The findings confirmed this hypothesis, indicating that the human capital investment strategy in Hong Kong is not sufficient to break down the barriers for children in disadvantaged social positions.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2011.594419]

One of the main features of globalization is the increasing mobility of population. As an immigrant society, Hong Kong has witnessed waves of Mainland Chinese arrivals and assimilation into her mainstream, particularly around the change of sovereignty period. school-aged children constitute a substantial fraction of the new population. Given their potential impact on Hong Kong's present and future, how these immigrant youngsters perform in school has always been a concern to the public as well as the government. This study compared Hong Kong 8th-graders' mathematics performance in the four rounds of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study by their immigrant status. The results showed that the first-generation immigrant students' performance had obvious retrogression compared to native students in the past years. Among the natives, non-local-born students with only their father born in Hong Kong had the most similar performance as the first-generation immigrants. The causes for the differences are explored from both internal and external perspectives.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2011.621673]

Since 2004, the Hong Kong government has sought to build a regional education hub and develop an education industry. However, the rationales and intentions behind this move and the implications these have for the nurturing of local human capital and economic capacity are not always clear. This article seeks to contextualize Hong Kong's economic development within the global economy. Various related official policy documents are examined to decipher the role of the Hong Kong government and to ascertain how the development of a regional education hub and an education industry features in its plans. It is analysed that up till 2009, the goal of attracting foreign and Mainland human resources and talent, as a way to facilitate the inflow of human capital into Hong Kong, has overridden the goal of a viable and self-sustaining education industry. The article questions whether such a policy orientation is in the best interests of Hong Kong and whether developing Hong Kong into an education hub should be mainly seen as being a way of upgrading and revitalizing local higher education in order to better serve the local economy, which is under pressure to transform into a knowledge-based economy and to develop new growth poles.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2011.594418]

This paper explores the construction of local and national identities among secondary school students in post-colonial Hong Kong. As a Chinese society that has undergone a prolonged period of British colonial rule, the reunification of capitalist Hong Kong with the motherland under socialism in 1997 has set the context for a negotiation of identities. It has been revealed that the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has tried to foster a stronger sense of national identity and a sense of belonging among the younger generations through its education reform measures in the new millennium. Nation-building is part and parcel of the reform, although it is being interpreted and implemented diversely by local officials, school principals and teachers. The intersecting and overlapping nature of students' different identities has set the parameters of their identity formation but allows different latitudes of observance and/or choice of different identities.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2010.519691]