Drawing on findings from the extensive questionnaire survey and intensive case studies we conducted in Hong Kong secondary schools, this paper examines the interactions, tensions and gaps among the various stakeholders' visions, concerns and priorities as identified in the ongoing school reform. We examine the classroom dynamics of teaching and learning, the interactive pedagogical relationship involved, as well as the embedded institutional complexity in the schooling process, in order to understand what underlies the curriculum policy and education reform within the mainstream system. In view of the paramount significance of its evolvement in actual operation, we argue that education reform ought to be taken pragmatically but programmatically as the complexly embedded cultural process in which all the local practices and values of its stakeholders operate in the same cultural space. By conducting research on that interlocking cultural process, we also identify new options for Cultural Studies when education is taken seriously as the core of our intellectual project.
[Copyright of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.534579]

A collection of essays, edited by Lucy Green, offers case studies that center on the interface between learning, teaching, and musical identity (Indiana University Press, 2011). The papers examine the construct of identity in the context of musical education and musical practice of adults, adolescents, and children in places as varied as Australia, Bali, Brazil, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Iceland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
[Copyright of Ethnomusicology Forum is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2012.675856]