Despite the trendsetting of East Asian HPES, education policy commentary and literature on this region remains rather underdeveloped and predictable. In Comparing High-Performing Education Systems: Understanding Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, Dr Charlene Tan moves scholarship on East Asian HPES in a new, sorely needed direction. This review essay of Comparing High-Performing Education Systems describes the guiding conceptual framework of the book and summarizes the book, chapter-by-chapter. This review essay also comments on two striking issues – the explanatory power of Confucian habitus, and the intersectionality of performativity, Confucianism, and neoliberalism. The aim in this review essay is to both celebrate the boldness of Comparing High Performing Systems and offer questions to further enrich the employment of Confucianism as a conceptual and analytical tool to examine education policies, processes, and outcomes in East Asian systems.
[Copyright of Discourse-Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education is the property of Routledge.]

Since the implementation of the "Whole School Approach to Integrated Education" in 1997, mainstream schools in Hong Kong have been encouraged to admit students who are identified with a wide range of learning needs. More recently, the concept of “inclusion” in the city has been widened to incorporate a significant number of newly arrived children from the mainland China, as well as non-Chinese speaking students. Given such a diversity of school population, however, research tends to suggest that practitioners in Hong Kong do not take a positive attitude towards inclusion. When responding to the challenges posed by inclusive education, it is important for practitioners and policy makers not to overlook legitimate local differences, especially in the role ascribed to education in the culture, and the processes of exclusion in different national settings. In this connection, this paper aims to provide a direction for the development of a cultural model of inclusion. By exploring the cultural meaning of “inclusion”, and observing how teachers respond to the diverse needs of learners in practice, the Model is expected to set a cultural-specific framework for inclusive teacher education. 自1997年,政府推行全校參與模式的融合教育,並不斷鼓勵香港主流學校接納不同類別而有特殊教育需要的學生入讀。近年來,融合的概念已涵蓋至照顧內地新來港兒童和非華語學童的需要。然而,即使學校的學生有不同的學習需要,很多研究卻均顯示參與者對融合教育的態度並不積極正面。面對融合教育的挑戰,參與者及政策制訂者不應忽視本土內各項差異,尤其是於文化層面內教育的角色及社會層面中是否存在排斥的情況。本文旨在為融合教育的文化模式提供一個發展方向。透過研究融合教育的文化含義和觀察教師處理學生差異的實際教學方式,期望為教師培訓製訂一系列有文化特色的融合教育教學法。
[Copyright of Hong Kong Journal of Special Education is the property of Special Education Society of Hong Kong Ltd.. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
https://sites.google.com/a/seshk.org.hk/seshk-org-hk/c_publication]

This paper addresses some fundamental methodological and ethical issues confronting non-Chinese researchers undertaking research in Hong Kong Chinese society. Among other things, it considers problems pertaining to data collection, the challenges of data interpretation, and the implication that this has for research. Whilst the issues are by no means unique to Hong Kong, there are a number of matters related to outsider research that require special attention in the Hong Kong Chinese context, even when the researchers may be acquainted with both the context and the participants. Understanding the context of research, including the socio-cultural context of which the research participants are a part leads to an enhanced understanding of the issues at hand. This paper intends to serve as an overview that may guide future research in Hong Kong. Issues raised in this paper will need re-theorizing in order to provide a more realistic and comprehensive view of the need to re-examine the paradigms that guide research methodology in Confucian societies.
[Copyright of International Journal of Research and Method in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1743727X.2012.736484]

This paper argues that the concepts, beliefs and understandings of local and non-local teacher educators in a Hong Kong university are grounded in their own cultural cognition and antecedents. It presents the viewpoint that contemporary notions of good practice were compromised when applied to a context that is strongly influenced by the tenets of Confucianism. Thus the conclusion is that the contingencies of teaching and learning contexts are sufficiently different to compromise the goal of having pre-constructed notions of good teaching. The alternative is that university tutors and future researchers re-conceptualise good teaching practices within a context that gives it meaning and purpose.
[Copyright of Journal of Education for Teaching is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2010.497395]