Art classrooms and museums are places where teachers and students talk about artworks. However, there is a lack of empirical research into dialogue—the most basic component of classroom teaching and the most used education strategy in museums. I investigated the development and experimentation of a dialogue-and-questioning framework for art classrooms and museums. I conducted a design-based research study with seven primary schoolteachers and 187 6th-grade students in Hong Kong. I found that the total number of questions asked by the teacher participants increased significantly. Teachers’ performance, when asking personal connection, observation, interpretation, and evaluation questions, also improved significantly. They became more conscious of relating artworks to the students in a personal way and developed a practice that fostered a more comprehensive understanding of artworks. Student participants began to approach artworks from different perspectives and engaged in more in-depth examinations. Copyright © 2022 National Art Education Association.

The meanings and value of the arts and their impact on students’ learning have long been main areas of focus in arts education research. In Hong Kong, there are only a few studies discussing the impact of performing arts education on students’ learning, which leaves a gap in the overall understanding of performing arts education. This article reports on a study of performing arts education in Hong Kong. The participants of the study are students, teachers, principals and arts groups. A total of 28 focus group interviews were conducted with participants recruited from 25 primary schools, 26 secondary schools, one international school, nine tertiary institutions, five special schools and 20 arts groups. Although this study confirms the claims made by arts educators that performing arts education can promote students’ awareness of creative and critical thinking skills, change their behavior and attitudes, increase their socio-cultural awareness and benefit their all-round development, the stakeholders had different interpretations of the meaning and value of performing arts education. There appears to be a gap between arts groups and schools in the understanding of the fundamental purposes of performing arts education and the role that it should play in the school context. Copyright © 2022 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

There is a lack of empirical research into group dialogue and questioning - the most basic component of teaching in art lessons. This study investigated the dialogues conducted by primary school visual arts teachers with their students. Eight teacher participants were observed and their teaching was examined against a theoretical framework constructed from a spectrum of dialogue and questioning strategies proposed by various theorists. From the observed dialogues, it was found that most teachers focused primarily on the observation and visual analysis of artworks. They also introduced some essential contextual knowledge to their students. However, interpretations of artworks were rather limited. Lastly, the development of students' personal connections with and judgment of artworks were ignored by most of the teachers. The study is particularly meaningful given the increased emphasis on learning art criticism in the new visual arts curriculum and amidst the latest cultural developments in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2019 Australian Institute of Art Education.

This paper reports on a hermeneutic phenomenological study on the experiences of visual arts teachers teaching students with intellectual disabilities in Hong Kong. Themes which emerged from the interviews were examined in conjunction with the lived experiences of the teachers. Special school visual arts teachers who participated in this study have strong emotional and personal connections with their students. The teachers had experienced difficulties when teaching their students and many of the problems were unique to the special school settings. In an effort to tackle these problems and improve their teaching, these teachers engaged in reflection and explored a variety of ways to enhance their students' learning. In spite of the practical learning problems their students face, the teachers maintained that studying visual arts is beneficial to their students 'whole-person development. The paper concludes with a critical reflection on the nature of teaching visual arts to students with intellectual disabilities.
[Copyright © 2015 Australian Association of Special Education Inc.]

Art education in Hong Kong has undergone various changes in response to educational reform. In art assessment, a major change in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum is the inclusion of art criticism as a compulsory component of the new public examination. Assessing students’ abilities to interpret art in an art criticism public examination context is a critical issue in Hong Kong because the new senior secondary curriculum and assessment has brought attention to the role of written language in the art examination paper. This means the examination assesses not only students’ abilities to interpret art, but also their language abilities required to respond to art in written form. Since this new mode of assessment of art criticism has been published a number of issues have appeared. Recent studies show that teachers and students perceive this development negatively and they believe that the written format will assess students’ written language abilities rather than their critical abilities. These findings challenge the justification of the new art assessment policy and raise questions about the role of written language in responding to art. This article aims to raise the issue of the marriage between language and art criticism in the Hong Kong public examination context. It argues and examines the relationship of language to art interpretation, reasoning in the assessment, and issues in the public art criticism examination context. The issues addressed in this article provide opportunities for researchers and policy makers to reconsider and refine the new form of examination.
[Copyright © 2017 The Author. Ijade © 2017 NSEAD/John Wiley & Sons Ltd.]