The fact that the number of sojourn programs organised to overseas and mainland China has grown rapidly in recent years in secondary schools in Hong Kong underlines the interest of schools in embracing the ideal of providing more learning opportunities for students under the growing impact of globalization. In this study, with its definition referring to short-term programs organised by Hong Kong secondary schools for students to reside temporarily in a foreign land for the purpose of learning, these popular programs have been playing a significant role in internationalisation of Hong Kong education through varied student interactions with peoples and cultures. This study particularly attempts to explore the nature of sojourn programs, how different stakeholders think about the importance and their impact on the process of internationalisation of Hong Kong secondary education. The study also explores how secondary schools in Hong Kong maintain a balance between destinations in China and overseas (such as Australia, UK and Canada) in an era of educational reforms.
This is a doctoral work in progress, a primitive research and data collected will be presented to reveal the significance of the study.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

A school-based environmental field project "What Happens Around You and Your School Area?' was designed under the School-based Curriculum Project Scheme (2001–2002) supported by the Hong Kong Education Manpower Bureau (formerly the Education Department). This school-based environmental field project, with heavy inclusion of environmental elements, was designed in the form of issue-based field inquiry based on student-centred learning to encourage subsequent meaningful learning activities such as group discussion, role-playing exercises and photograph exhibition in class. The field project possesses distinctive geographical and environmental characteristics of the school surrounding environments to bring about meaningful learning among students who study in a local standard new town secondary school in Hong Kong. This paper aims to share this field project experience of designing meaningful issue-based field inquiry using the theory of learning and awareness (Marton & Booth, 1997) to open up the space of learning for students (Marton et al., 2004; Runesson & Marton, 2002). Also based on the framework of educational and environmental ideologies (Fien, 1993), the intended learning outcomes of the field project are to empower students to become active small environmentalists (Kwan, 1995) who are well prepared in terms of geographical and environmental knowledge, skills and values.
[Copyright of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14724040408668453 ]