This paper draws on Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse and practice to explain the controversy surrounding civic education in Hong Kong, through the case of a compulsory secondary school subject called Liberal Studies (LS). The distinct advantage of a Bernsteinian approach is that its conceptual grammar cogently captures the contentious nature of LS and locates the structural autonomy of teachers. This article highlights the fragmented nature of the LS curriculum, which attests to a historical legacy of the Hong Kong education system that favours a subject-based curriculum in practice and a managerialist approach to teacher staffing. These institutional parameters exert profound influences on LS teachers’ modalities of practice. This study contributes to the burgeoning interest in applying Bernsteinian scholarship to the East-Asian region by nuancing the role of teachers in mediating the contentious LS curriculum and implementing civic education. Finally, further application of the Bernsteinian approach will be discussed. Copyright © 2021 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

Private tutoring has become a widespread phenomenon worldwide, partly due to the global trend of marketisation and commodification of education. Informed by a discursive view of identity and through multimodal discourse analysis, this study aims to unveil part of the shadow education discourse by investigating the identities of 41 English language tutors portrayed in their biographies on the websites of six leading tutorial schools in Hong Kong. The findings suggest that the tutors project identities as (1) an authoritative exam expert, (2) a popular star, and (3) a well-qualified English language teacher. These multiple identities overlap and collectively create an 'exam expert-star-teacher' hybrid identity. The study sheds light on how implicit values and beliefs about shadow education are created and manifested in educational and social discourses, particularly when biography in tutorial advertisements is a prevailing commercial genre with promotional purposes. Copyright © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This paper sets out to queer education's normative human-centric assumptions and to de-centre the straight and narrow vision of the child as only ever becoming an autonomous individual learner. It re-focuses upon the more-than-human learning that takes place when we pay attention to queerer aspects of children's, as well as our own, entangled becomings in the common worlds in which we live. In this case, the entangled becomings are those of children and dogs. Drawing upon Donna Haraway's notion of 'queer worlding' and Karen Barad's assertion of 'nature's queer performativity', the authors explore how we might go about 'queer worlding' childhood. Using deconstructive and diffractive methods, they trace a selection of entangled child-dog events across three sites: the streets of Hong Kong; an Australian early childhood education bush setting; and an exhibition in a Swedish art museum. Through narrating some of the more disconcerting aspects of these events, the authors reveal how we might tap into the 'queer worlding' ways in which the world is acting on us, even as we are acting on it.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2014.888842]

This article mobilises story-telling to narrate the authors lived experience of teaching English as a minority academic in one Australian university. Positioning himself as living 'in- between' two cultures and as an 'Other', the author tells his story of how he has been 'racialised' and 'Othered' because he does not look White, and his spoken English is distinctly accented; hence, his legitimacy of teaching English is held suspect. The author's story contributes to the theorising of the sociology of the in-between with the argument that while living in-between culture can be a space of negativity, it can also be a space of empowerment if one exercises choice and agency by forging new spaces. The authors ends his story-telling with a happy ending by presenting a contrasting story of how his run-away from Australia to (a new space in) Hong Kong to teach English has reaffirmed his cultural capital as he morphed into a different 'Other'.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.666073]

This study explores whether the deficit approach to understanding youth, which has been widely critiqued in contemporary youth studies, could still be a dominant paradigm in an emerging curriculum which emphasises multiple-perspective thinking. The analysis compares the representations of youth in selected reference sources at different levels of curriculum- making of the liberal studies (LS) secondary school curriculum in Hong Kong. These include: (1) the official website of the curriculum, (2) the textbooks and (3) the teachers' verbal accounts. The findings indicate that the curriculum contents at the institutional level (the LS official website) do not really favour a deficit representation of youth, but that the contents at the program level and at the classroom level do intensify that deficit representation. The findings shed light on the discourse of youth in education regimes and inform future research.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.692960]

This paper explores two current issues in the educational policies and practices of Hong Kong that have been shaped by the emergence of the nation-state and the return of Hong Kong's sovereignty from the UK to the People's Republic of China on 1 July 1997. Since this time there have been two great challenges facing music education. The first concerns how to incorporate diverse cultures, including Chinese music, into a Western-orientated music curriculum; and the second is to find a way to cultivate national identity and democracy through music education. The data presented here were collected via in-depth, semi-structured individual interviews with music teachers, school heads and assistant school heads across 40 primary and secondary schools between 2006 and 2007. The findings can be explained by referring to the shortcomings of multicultural education and the underdevelopment of democracy in Hong Kong's education system.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596300902809203]

This article discusses citizenship education, education policy and discourse to explore their relations with the exercise of power in society. Taking the case of 1990 and 1997 legislative debates on citizenship education policy in Hong Kong, it briefly surveys the substantive arguments favouring or opposing the retention of government controls over politics in schools. It then examines in more detail the discourses used by legislators which constitute students, teachers and the government. This discussion shows that not only does citizenship education represent a power relation between the state and citizens, with policy representative of the power of the state over educational workers, but also that the targets of policy are empowered and disempowered through the strategic use of discourse.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596300600676144]

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Hong Kong (HK) school curriculum, especially the general curriculum for civic education and other social subjects, in relation to the political events of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, and the return of HK's sovereignty from the United Kingdom (UK) to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1997. This paper will argue that since 1984, the school curriculum of HK has been marked by tensions brought about by political cultures shaped by the UK and the PRC, the bureaucratic mechanisms of which are used to make sure that those curriculum contents that are judged to be politically correct are taught in school. Over the last two decades the school curriculum has been depicted as being shaped by the emergence of the nation-state and the transfer of sovereignty. Granted that political and national education forms part of the school culture, the question of how to shape students to be patriotic through the curriculum will continue to be contentious.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596300701289045]

This article aims to contribute to an understanding of principalship in Hong Kong through probing the formation and preservation of the deep leadership structures that shape its practice. Deep structures are formed partly through a dynamic relationship between constitution and culture which forms bounded "codes" of understanding, conduct and behaviour which combine to shape principalship in Hong Kong and power relationships within schools and collections of schools. After providing a brief historical snapshot of Hong Kong education development since 1945, the paper explores the recent context of principalship and how this influences its shape in schools. Discussion of context focuses on the interconnected elements of constitution and traditional culture. These factors are illustrated using the issues of principal selection and teacher and parent empowerment to show the influence of deep leadership structures on the principal and the system. Depending on the perspective taken, these can be understood as either supportive or obstructive to better school leadership.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0159630042000178491]