This paper reports a case study of teaching Cantonese to Hong Kong ethnic minority pre-schoolers using process drama. Based on Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts of minor literature and language, becoming and de-/re-territorialisation, this paper aims to reconceptualise a playful adaptation of process drama developed by Joe Winston (Citation2012) as a language-minoritising approach to the teaching and learning of a major language that is very foreign to children. The findings suggest that, to accomplish ethnic minority children’s becoming Cantonese speakers, the theatre games and language play should involve minoritorisation and de-/re-territorialisation of the normative practices of process drama, the target language as well as learner identity. Copyright © 2023 Pedagogy, Culture & Society.

In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau (EDB) regularly assesses the quality of services provided by publicly subsidized kindergartens to children aged 3 to 6. Quality Review (QR) reports are written by government officials and published on the EDB's website. This study analyzes the feedback pertaining to Arts and Creativity to better understand the role this learning area plays in Hong Kong kindergartens. Lexical and content analyses were applied on 164 QR reports published between 2017 and 2020. Findings showed that: (1) the role of Arts and Creativity in the QR reports is relatively minor, which suggests that this learning area is somewhat secondary in Hong Kong kindergartens; (2) presence of the various art forms differs significantly, with Music and Visual Arts being more frequent than Drama and especially Dance; and (3) classroom activities seem to be teacher-centered, product-oriented, and reproductive. Findings suggest that the Arts and Creativity pedagogies enacted in Hong Kong kindergartens are not fully consistent with the official kindergarten Curriculum Guide, which draws on a Western conceptualization of creativity in the arts. We argue that this curriculum/practice gap reveals the need for local stakeholders to embrace a "glocalization" paradigm. Limitations, future research, and implications are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Jerry Yeung et al.

This study aims to conceptualise a drama-integrated curriculum devised from process drama as an approach to play-based pedagogy and curriculum to realise the policy initiative of learning through play. By investigating teachers’ perspectives and practices in relation to the curriculum of a local kindergarten, examples of effective drama-integration strategies and the associated children's learning are identified and organised into four themes – namely, drama teaching and learning through, before, in and after play. The teachers understood that although their curriculum is not based on free play, its not-so-free features may reconcile the play–learning binarism, daring them to navigate the maze of complex relationships between play, drama, teaching and learning in implementing a playful curriculum. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s).

Hong Kong preschool teachers have long been portrayed as ineffective reform implementers entrenched in the Confucian educational practices. This study, conducted in an award-winning drama partnership, solicits nineteen teachers’ voices on their first-hand experiences in using process drama for curriculum and pedagogical innovation. Based on Bakhtin’s voice theory and thematic analysis, the study identifies various kinds of teacher-reported benefits of this western educational borrowing, ranging from teaching capacity building, perceptual changes concerning childhood and teachers’ role, to personal wellbeing enhancement. Unlike previous studies, these findings represent teachers as effective implementers of process drama and active agents of education reform. Copyright © 2021 American Alliance for Theatre and Education.

This response to COVID-19 introduces a Hong Kong drama education project that aims to support teachers' and children's return to school after the easing of COVID-19 pandemic. A pilot workshop has been conducted to explore and evaluate the approach of the project and to identify the needs of the teachers under the pandemic. Preliminary observations show that the integrated use of play, process drama and integrated arts education can enhance the teachers' resilience in a crisis situation. Apart from providing them with timely, practical and multi-pronged pedagogical support, the workshop methodology also promotes their personal wellbeing. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In this paper, drawing on Bakhtin's carnival theory, I argue that teachers can play a transgressive role - similar to that of the carnival fool - by taking on a story role and by interacting with the children in the drama convention of Teacher-in-Role. The carnival notion of 'decrowning-crowning' allows me to understand how the teachers disguise and share their power in the drama classroom. Based on a lesson conducted in a Hong Kong kindergarten, I investigate how the teachers and the children's acting bodies, exaggerated emotions and transgressive props can materialise 'decrowning-crowning' actions. In the process, the teachers decrown themselves of their own authority, parody the given story and at the same time, crown the children to laugh, feel, respond and act freely. However, the mainstream ideology and educational culture prevailing in Hong Kong can regress in the process and serve to restrict, if not counterfeit, the decrowning-crowning process.
[Copyright © 2017 Pedagogy, Culture & Society.]

This chapter adopts a cultural perspective to report on a study of teaching and learning early Chinese literacy for young children in one Hong Kong kindergarten. Instead of viewing literacy education as a neutral and standardised cultural process across Chinese speaking communities, I draw on a Sinophone perspective and post-colonialism to investigate how the linguistic dissonance and cultural hybridity of Hong Kong influences teaching practices in one local kindergarten.
[Copyright © 2017 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.]

Performance tasks This paper reports the initial stage of a learning study on enhancing kindergarten teachers' teaching of performance tasks in Hong Kong. Data from classroom observation and post-lesson interviews with two kindergarten teachers were analysed to identify the existing teaching practice focusing on four typical classroom performance tasks: storytelling, drawing pictures, singing nursery rhyme and physical movement. The findings have indicated that both teachers often simplified the object of learning into declarative knowledge and used passive receptive activities and neglected the specific disciplinary skill-related aspects and seldom used active productive activities, which will more probably lead to deeper learning. The factors shaping these teaches' practice are also discussed and elaborated. The room for further improvement of these teachers is then identified as the object of learning for the teachers and the critical features of these performance tasks specified for student learning in the coming learning study projects. The paper concludes with implications and recommendations on teacher education for pre-school teachers in Hong Kong.

Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of creative understanding, this paper aims to investigate children’s creative learning of drama education in a group of preschoolers aged 4–5 in a Hong Kong kindergarten. The research was designed originally to offer a case study to identify the emergence of creative learning during and after drama lessons, and investigate its relation to teaching. The field observations, however, noticed the contrary effect brought by a product-oriented and a teacher-centred approach of teaching. These approaches had strongly undermined the stimulus to imaginative and playful participation that drama education is able to generate purportedly. Not only had they restricted dialogic encounters in the lessons but also the feasibility of identifying children’s creative response emerging from within. These observations led to a shift of the study focus to the method and data of draw-and-tell, which was used to enable children to creatively re-imagine and retell their drama experiences as a concluding reflection. The findings were analysed in three categories, namely Characterization, Re-conceptualization and Transformation to illustrate children’s capacity and techniques of restorying drama experiences with their interest, knowledge, language and culture. The research process as well as the results of the study reveal a complex interplay between teaching, learning and researching affirming that a particular type of creative learning of drama education is not only shaped by a particular form of teaching, but also the research method.
[Copyright © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.]

Drawing on the theory of dialogism and the literature on children’s culture and cultural resistance, this article investigates the contextual and textual features of the cultural making of a group of children in sociodramatic play in a Hong Kong kindergarten. Different from other, similar studies, this study reports that under the gaze of the teacher, children’s play is largely practised as a reproduction of the teacher’s cultural texts. Children’s culture or resistance only arises as a bricolage of various cultural texts in which the cultural texts of the teacher and the children are intertwined, dissonant and hybridized. Two major modes of bricolage are identified. They are hybridization and invalidation. This result suggests that the teacher’s strategies and authoritarian discourse are suppressive of the children’s culture, aiming largely to shape the way and process of their cultural making. Nonetheless, from the evidence in this study, it is believed that bricoleur is a creative act as it involves tactful and creative appropriation, orchestration and transformation of all sorts of cultural texts which are at hand. The pretend play corner is consequently reframed and recreated as a heteroglot playing space of the children’s own.
[Copyright © The Author(s) 2012.]