This paper was inspired by three important concerns in higher education, namely, changes in higher education curricula (Bourner, 2004), concept of a fully functioning university (Bourner, 2008), and nature of education, such a university offers (Bourner, Heath, & Rospigliosi, 2013). To prepare university graduates for the unpredictable changes and diversified needs of a fast-growing world, the authors explore the use of narrative knowing in designing a student-centered curriculum. This paper reports the learning achieved by students when a Hong Kong university applies the under-developed narrative pedagogy in teaching and learning. Copyright © 2018 James Nicholas Publishers.

The academic year 2012/13 marked a major milestone in the history of Hong Kong higher education as it witnessed the admission of two markedly different cohorts of Cantonese-speaking freshmen to the city's English-medium universities: those embarking for the last time upon the traditional 3-year programme modelled on the British system of initial disciplinary specialisation and those commencing the new 4-year programme featuring an American-influenced first year of general education. This article presents the findings of a study which sought to compare the perceptions and experiences of the two cohorts on the challenging process of adjusting to the demands of university study. It was hypothesised that students in the 3-year cohort (3YC) would experience fewer difficulties adjusting to university learning and teaching than the 4-year cohort (4YC) as it was assumed that their A-level programme (years 12–13) placed greater emphasis on university-related skills, practices and habits of mind than the new senior-secondary curriculum (years 10–12). This hypothesis was tested by means of a survey completed by 1480 students at Hong Kong Polytechnic University towards the end of the academic year. The results largely support this hypothesis, although the evidence suggests that both cohorts had adjusted moderately well to university study by the end of the year. The results indicate that the principal difference between the two cohorts and the key to the 3YC's smoother transition was their greater confidence and competence in English, which presumably stemmed from their extra year at school and the greater depth of the traditional sixth-form curriculum.
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The University of Hong Kong (HKU), following its establishment in 1911, has assumed the mission of bridging British and Chinese cultures, to prepare European and Chinese elite youth for political and other professional careers, and thus to improve Britain's cultural influence in competition with other western powers with regard to China. Dominated by its colonial character and pragmatic orientation, Chinese education at HKU was confined to no more than a supplementary subject at the initial stage. However, colonial crisis and cultural changes in the 1920s and 1930s, together with the endeavours of local cultural and commercial elites, made advanced Chinese education at HKU necessary and possible, and led to an independent unit for Chinese education and Chinese studies being established and strengthened. Organisational and curricular reforms before the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941 led to further modernisation and solidified the structure of Chinese education at this university, laying the essential foundation for its post-war recovery and development. The evolution of Chinese education at HKU demonstrated well the subtle entanglements of education, culture and politics in a colonial context, through which coexistence and tensions between tradition and modernity, between China and the West, and between the imperial and republican intellectuals were also vividly revealed.
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We examine school choices made by western expatriate parents in post-colonial Hong Kong in order to understand the essence of imagined global citizenship and its implications for existing ethnic and class inequalities in the education system. Responding to changes in the global job market, a small but increasingly visible group of parents are seeking to challenge what they see as the constraints of expatriate life by developing global opportunities for their children through Cantonese language acquisition in the local education system. Drawing on the sociological literature on school choice and middle-class identity, we argue that these parents are negotiating for themselves a global imaginary in which cultures can easily be traversed and social class is levelled. But such global desires, we suggest, can also replicate colonial privilege in a way that marginalises poorer schools and other ethnic minorities in the education system.
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Teachers' instructional practices surrounding written assignments have been little researched, despite writing remaining the primary means of assessment in higher education, including postgraduate professional development programmes. In this paper, we report a study that explored what a sample of lecturers in a Master of Education programme at an English-medium university in Hong Kong did to support students' assignment writing. We integrate perspectives provided by the relevant higher education literature, the academic literacies approach and North American rhetorical genre studies to shed light on the findings derived from our analyses of interview and documentary data. We showed that our lecturer participants both engaged in direct instruction on assignment writing and provided indirect support. Our study contributed to the existing literature and raised questions for future research.
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The cost of higher education (HE) continues to grow at an unsustainable rate in many country contexts, including in East Asia. With recent and projected HE growth in this region, HE administrators are increasingly faced with how best to provide cost-effective delivery while at the same time addressing how to meet workforce demands of increased quality, accountability, and international standards of excellence. In this article, we examine good and best practices of HE finance models in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. A primary objective of this article is to highlight a select number of exemplary models of HE financing that can reduce or at least help level off this unsustainable trend. We conclude with recommendations to assist policy makers, government planners, and HE administrators in their attempts to meet the financial challenges of today and in the future.
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One way that universities assess teaching effectiveness is by eliciting student feedback. However, what standards do students themselves use to judge whether a lecturer is a 'good' teacher? As part of a study carried out at a Hong Kong university, students were interviewed about their first-year learning experience and asked what they felt constituted 'good' and 'bad' teaching. Unlike when asked to complete teacher effectiveness surveys, no criteria or characteristics were given. Responses focused primarily on teaching skills that supported student learning and encouraged critical thinking, particularly the teacher's ability to give clear explanations supported by relevant, practical examples.
[Copyright of Journal of Further & Higher Education is the property of Routledge.]

Research conducted in the late twentieth century pointed to a gulf in Hong Kong's universities between institutional medium-of-instruction policy, which stipulated the use of English, and lecturers' classroom practices, which often involved the use of Cantonese to present and explain the content of English-language textbooks and teaching materials. This article examines the findings of a study which sought to determine whether the policy-practice divide had widened or narrowed in the past two decades under the pressure of two potentially competing forces: globalisation and decolonisation. The evidence suggests that the policy-practice disjunction may have narrowed significantly in recent years, with most of the participants' teachers evidently making a determined effort to instruct and interact with their students in English in lectures and seminars.
[Copyright of World Englishes is the property of Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd..]

Research on transnational Higher Education governance has provided a thesis explaining how East Asian states have successfully selectively blended elements of globalisation in Higher Education with their pre-existing regulatory regimes. However, this paper argues that the thesis overlooks the significance of local politics in understanding the formulation of Higher Education policy, thus insufficiently acknowledging the indeterminacy that arises in the globalisation process. To address this argument, this paper examines the transnational Higher Education development in Singapore and Hong Kong and explains how political resistance and corresponding policy changes that emerged in these two societies help reconceptualise transnational Higher Education governance.
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Responses from 309 randomly sampled Hong Kong primary school music teachers to the shortened version of the Chinese Teacher Stress Questionnaire were subjected to a descriptive percentage analysis, one-way ANOVA and independent t test. Obtained results identify five key stressors: "changing education policy of the government"; "being observed by colleague, student teachers, college tutors, inspectors or parents";"too much subject matter to teach"; "inclusive education"; and "additional administrative work". An explanation is offered identifying stressor responses being underpinned by either global or contextual issues, while others by a combination of both. Unlike other studies that found relations between stressors and respondents' individual characteristics, the results of this study uniquely display no significant statistical evidence to link music teachers' stressor response levels with age, teaching experience, education, specialization or teaching-related workload. The evidence here supports the view that stressors are neutral and reported stressor response levels reflect global or contextual factors which can be intensified by a combination of both.
[Copyright of International Journal of Music Education is the property of Sage Publications Ltd..]