For the past few decades, cultural studies scholars and critical educators in such contexts as North America, Australia and the UK have called upon their fellow scholars to cross disciplinary borders in framing and addressing educational issues. Inter-disciplinary work as such would recognize cultural studies as bodies of knowledges and approaches to be applied in new educational settings. It would also acknowledge the need for more and better studies of schooling in order to reflect on the problematics of the sites in their specific historical and institutional contexts. This paper discusses my earlier work that investigated a pedagogical issue of project learning in the Hong Kong senior secondary school subject Liberal Studies as a case of doing cultural studies and education between the disciplinary borders of the two fields. The paper examines the interdisciplinary conceptual-analytical framework of drama and the performative I adopted to understand the complex nature of project learning as a mode of learning. It ends by reflecting on the spaces such an interdisciplinary analytical framing might open for cultural studies' interventions into the schooling system.
Copyright of Cultural Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.900099

Grounded in the interdisciplinary educational work of Cultural Studies, this paper examines the pedagogical potentials of narrative and performance for the teaching of writing as a mode of public discourse. Guided to address a wide readership, students engage in critical communication aimed at linking self inquiry and narrative discourse to the contextual analysis of the social. Drawing on research findings derived from the undergraduate teaching of cultural criticism as a genre of public writing at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, we look at how educational drama mediates the work of narrative and performative acts involving the young learner-writers and contributes to the shaping of a dialogic mode of address and communication, thus articulating the process and impact of writing to the public-oriented discourse in Cultural Studies education. In light of such acts in critical discourse and imagination targeted at the potential reader, we show how the young writers' own engagement with critical thinking and communication are opened up by drama-in-education adopted in the class, and argue how, in this sense, both writing and its learning process become effective stages in the making of the kind of cultural criticism we want to help students to learn.
[Copyright of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2013.769747]