Choral singing is a key feature of musical activity in Hong Kong schools. It has grown from modest beginnings into an important part of extra-curricular work. Even in independent societies and associations, many choral directors possess backgrounds in music education and classroom teaching. The teacher education institutions are responsible for training the majority of music teachers in Hong Kong. Thus it would seem necessary for music teacher courses to feature choral training to properly equip teachers before entering the classroom and taking the role of choral director in class, school and perhaps community. In the past there has been no choral director training programme. It seems important to develop ideas for what might be included for the professional development of the student choral teacher, and this is one objective of the current study. This article reports the implementation of a mentoring scheme carried out in a primary school setting. One of the current authors and an identified school choral teacher worked as mentors to provide professional support for a student choral teacher who was selected as the main participant in the case study. The aim was to investigate the potential of mentoring as a way of training a student choral director in a real school setting. Findings from this study reveal that through the mentoring scheme the student choral teacher was provided with an opportunity to interpret, generate, interact and experiment with the choral teaching theory in a real school choral rehearsal setting. This could be seen as a process of knowing-in-action and reflection-in-action.
[Copyright © 2006 The Hong Kong Institute of Education, International Society for Music Education.]

Many music teachers in Hong Kong secondary schools have ignored creative music making. In order to encourage creativity and imagination in music education, the Hong Kong Education Department is undertaking an education reform in which creative music making is advocated. However, recent studies reveal that many music teachers do not have relevant and sufficient training in these activities. This paper reports a study of designing and implementing a new teacher education module, which aims to equip in-service music teachers to undertake creative activities in school teaching. Results indicated that the trainees preferred learning more existing teaching packages to learning theories in creativity. Owing to the poor discipline and other contextual constraints, some of the trainees expressed a negative attitude towards creative activities. However, the lack of discipline-based knowledge and composition skills of the trainees was one of the major reasons leading to the negative attitude. These results imply that theory and practice should be closely related when preparing teachers to understand why and how creative projects should be delivered, with a number of teaching strategies derived from the study. The discipline-based knowledge should be more emphasized, which should be well integrated with pedagogical skills in teacher education programmes.
[Copyright © 2004 International Society for Music Education.]

This paper aims at identifying and recording good music teaching practices that promote social inclusion, and at developing effective teaching strategies that incorporate student perspectives into the pedagogies. A music teacher in Hong Kong was selected for this study, and two different classes of Form 2 (ages 12-13) were observed. The teaching process was videotaped and reviewed. Afterwards the teacher and a group of students were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview to solicit their ideas towards good practice of music teaching. Findings reveal that the good practices observed were attributed to four factors: 1) teacher’s personality, 2) teacher’s pedagogy, 3) teacher’s musical competence, and 4) teacher’s philosophy of teaching.

Schooling has been the main approach for transmitting knowledge and skills in both Eastern and Western cultures. The conservatory, for instance, has been the main cradle of great musicians. However, traditional folk arts in the East relied on apprenticeship using an oral approach for transmission. Applying Lave and Wenger's theory of legitimate peripheral participation as a theoretical framework, this article reports an interview study with five Cantonese opera artists in Hong Kong, all of whom have previously served and led apprenticeships. It was evident that the master artists took on limited numbers of apprentices for the purposes of transmitting personal artistry rather than monetary benefit. The master and the apprentice build up a quasi-parental relationship while the apprentice was regarded as a family member of the field. This study supplements the aforementioned theoretical framework with the Chinese cultural element of family ethics which may imply an application of apprenticeship in artistic and non-artistic transmissions through schooling.
[Copyright of Pedagogy, Culture & Society is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2014.922604]

This article reports on the personal beliefs and attitudes of highly motivated Hong Kong school-age subjects who studied music. A total of 24 participants who demonstrated high achievement and interest in learning music were interviewed. Content analysis of the interview data was performed to elucidate four topics: background information about the music learning of participants, their feelings about learning music, their perceptions of parental expectations of the learning of different subjects, and music learning in schools. A detailed analysis was conducted to understand the views of participants on attainment value, task value, task difficulty and intrinsic motivation. Based on the results, a theoretical framework was derived that includes three developmental stages: (1) initial motivation, (2) short-term involvement and the learning process and (3) long-term involvement and ongoing commitment. The study contributes to the understanding of the developmental trajectory of these Asian participants by detailing intrinsic and extrinsic factors that impacted on their musical development.
[Copyright of Music Education Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2011.553278 ]