Elite schools take globalization seriously. But, how do they imagine globalization and put "globalization in action"? Drawing on Burawoy's (2000) sociological framework, "global forces, connectivity and imaginations", this paper reveals how two elite schools, Catheral College in Hong Kong, and Clarence High, in Singapore re-position schooling vis-à-vis globalization. From the broader global imaginings of the two elite schools, the paper then moves on to the micro analysis of the school's curriculum as an exemplification of "globalization in action". There is a visible articulation of learning outside the classroom and beyond its shores in the two elite schools. Students travel to far flung and regional countries for immersion, service learning, leadership training and study tour to widen their portfolio of academic credential; for elite schools know best that good grades for these high caliber students is a given. What they need to add on to their cultural capital are cosmopolitan sensibilities and dispositions. Elite schools clearly have this pedagogical mission in mind when they globalized their curriculum, but are these travels merely educational tourism as critics have suggested or does travel and mobility indeed shape their cosmopolitan sensibilities and dispositions? And is this for the nation or beyond the nation? The final section of the paper draws on interview data to discuss how travel and mobility shape students' subjectivity and affect, and their 'being' and 'becoming' in relation to the nation and/or beyond the nation.

Come August 2009, schools in Hong Kong will be rolling out a new Language Arts Elective called "Learning English Through Popular Culture" to be offered to the Senior Form. This new Popular Culture elective in the New Senior Curriculum is of analytic interest as Hong Kong is the first schooling system, at least in Asia, to take Popular Culture seriously and translate it as "curriculum-as-knowledge" in the national curriculum. While the relationship between Popular Culture and its relevance for schooling and classroom pedagogies has been explored in educational research, in the last decade or so, research conducted in this field has yielded a somewhat tentative and predictable finding often expressed as "pedagogical implications for literacy education and curriculum development" and, as isolated case studies. Yet the Hong Kong education system has taken up what appears to be a bold move to re-design its English Language Curriculum to include Popular Culture - a new curriculum that ostensibly takes into consideration students' interests in popular cultural texts to promote the learning of English. Promising as this new curriculum might be, there are however inherent pedagogical trouble spots in the spelled out curriculum. This paper critically examines and unpacks the articulation of the pedagogical knowledge of the new elective. Although the "curriculum-in-use" remains to be seen, I argue in this paper that the pedagogical investments of this new elective as defined in the curriculum, is reduced to "reading" and "writing" text types, where students are likely to be locked into a procedural way of "thinking" and "doing" popular cultural texts. I suggest how a critical pedagogical practice might be a more productive way of teaching the popular culture curriculum.