Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to compare and analyse the role and implementation of nationalistic education in Hong Kong and Macau special administrative regions (SARs) since their respective handover of sovereignty to China in the late 1990s. Both SARs face the educational need to cultivate a Chinese national identification among the students after the sovereignty changes. While Macau SAR has enjoyed a relatively smooth implementation of nationalistic education towards which Macau’s schools and students are largely receptive to nationalistic programmes since its handover in 1999, Hong Kong SAR Government’s nationalistic education was met by reservation from some parents, students and civil society’s groups under allegations of “political indoctrination” and “brain-washing”. The Hong Kong civil society’s resistance to National Education culminated in the anti-Moral and National Education protest in Summer 2012 and then Hong Kong schools and society. This paper attempts to provide an overview and analysis on the development of nationalistic education in both Hong Kong and Macao SARs, and to give some possible explanations on the factors that lead to differences of perceiving and responding to the nationalistic education between both places.Design/methodology/approach - After conducting a literature review, this study utilises different sources of data such as curriculum guidelines, previous studies and other scholarly findings in examining the development of civic education and national education policy in both SAR societies, as well as in discussing the possible developments of nationalistic education in both SARs by making references to previous studies of citizenship and nationalistic education.Findings - This study found out that different relationships between the two SAR Governments and their respective civil society, the extent of established socio-political linkages with China, as well as the introduction of a core subject of Liberal Studies in Hong Kong

This book makes a timely contribution to understanding perceptions on national identity and National Education, with both of them have become controversial topics in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China. In a so-called globalization era, national identity and National Education, with the latter having an aim of fostering a Chinese national identity in education, have been significantly pushed ahead by the Hong Kong SAR government since the early 2000s as a response to the return of sovereignty to China in 1997. Teacher perception matters to what they select and how they teach in the schools. By incorporating fieldworks of teacher interviews, observation and documentary analysis, this book argues for a multi-layered conception of identity, different aims, contents and diversified methods of National Education should be recognized. This book is likely to become a useful account of teacher perception on national identity and National Education in citizenship education literature, and it will be relevant to policymakers, teachers, trainers and researchers.
[Copyright © 2017 Routledge.]

This study investigates how a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s secondary school teacher developed and implemented global citizenship education by adapting a spiral teaching model of empathy, experiential learning and classroom-based inquiry learning activities in two teaching cycles. One key aim of Hong Kong’s education reform is to prepare students for challenges in a globalization age. This case study used action research on two different cohorts of about 36 students in two school years’ teaching cycles (2013–2014 and 2014–2015). The students were taught by a secondary school teacher with an aim of cultivating their empathy through experiential learning in authentic contexts. The author participated as a researcher who observed and facilitated the evaluation. The learning topic is ‘understanding poverty’ in this interdisciplinary junior secondary PSHE subject. The findings reveal that through an adaptation of empathy learning model, even junior secondary school students can develop perspective-taking empathy with experiential learning and classroom-based inquiry learning activities. Also, whereas the first teaching cycle started with experiencing different contexts of poverty before having classroom inquiry learning activities, the second teaching cycle started with exposing students to multiple quantitative and narrative descriptions of poverty and to investigate stories of those affected by poverty before having experiential learning of different contexts of poverty. There was a higher level of empathy by those students who were exposed to prior background and conceptual understanding before engaging in authentic learning. But the two cohorts of students could achieve the learning objectives of seeing through others’ perspectives, making imagined connections between their lives and the lives of others who are less fortunate, linking the local and the global by analyzing how the global economic restructuring affects the local lives, and fostering their willingness

This qualitative multiple-case study research attempts to shed light on controversies associated with National Education in Hong Kong by exploring the perceptions of National Education of secondary school teachers. Since the resumption of Hong Kong's sovereignty by China in 1997, national identification with Chinese has been a policy priority. There has been an increase of National Education which aims at cultivating a Chinese national identity. This study used convenient sampling method on 10 purposively chosen sample of experienced Hong Kong citizenship education teachers, with in-depth interviews as data collection method. The findings reveal that teachers perceive National Education with different aims and teaching methods, and knowledge transmission is highlighted in National Education. There are patriotic, affective, critical thinking approaches, experiential learning and reflective teaching in National Education. Apart from arguing for different pedagogies and assessments in teaching National Education, this paper also calls for recognizing global identity and global citizenship education.
[Copyright © Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong].

Choosing two schools as a case study, the article reports how teaching approaches can differ and explains how teacher style, school ethos, and student expectation can shape pedagogical choice. Impact of the teaching and the difficulties teachers encountered are also reported. Whilst this article is probably one of the first to explore the issue of human rights and rule of law teaching in Hong Kong, the fact that it is a small case study needs to be noted when reviewing the outcomes and conclusions of the study. The writing of this article was supported by the findings obtained from a Quality Education Fund project which aimed at assisting Hong Kong teachers to teach human rights and rule of law as part of Liberal Studies, which is a new senior secondary subject.
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