In Hong Kong, gender studies are a keenly researched area in the higher education sector. It is also our observation that many academics and teaching professionals have shown interest and growing concerns in gender issues. The anomaly is that while gender is palpably felt in classroom routines, why and how it matters rarely features in educational discourses at school level. We believe a comprehensive review of the existing literature in gender and education is needed for understanding the current phenomenon and identifying future research directions. In addition, such an exercise will also inform techniques and strategies in incorporating gender into teaching practice, the experimentation of which can be developed into gender-sensitive pedagogies. This can be considered as a form of action research that addresses the kind of gender issues that confront teaching professionals and advises how gender can be approached in subject-based teaching and learning and also professional training. Taken together, we intend to report the initial findings from a comprehensive and critical review of the current literature on gender education, and exemplars of conducting and promoting gender education identified in some specific areas; and recommend directions and ideas for research on conducting and promoting gender education at the school level.

The Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) as one of the five Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs) as well as the largest TEI in Hong Kong, it concerns very much on meeting the teacher competence standards to uphold a high standard of teacher education for benefiting the whole education community and maintain a high level of quality assurance for teacher education programme. As Field Experience (FE) is a cornerstone of any teacher education programmes that could interlock with other domains and content areas of the programme to achieving the most effective learning outcomes, HKIEd recently reviewed and constructed a new outcome-based framework for student teachers to actively engage in learning activities of FE in order to meeting the standards. This paper aims to (1) review the literature on teacher competence standards and its implication on teacher education, (2) demonstrate how HKIEd review and construct a new outcome-based framework, (3) critically analyse the quality of the new outcome-based FE framework from the latest literature and trends in teacher competence standards, and (4) conclude and recommend how the FE framework can be further developed for meeting and upholding teacher competence standards through a series of studies.