This paper reports on the long-term effectiveness of a non-formal co-curricular educational program based on a campus ecogarden at a Hong Kong university in developing pro-sustainability awareness, attitudes and behavior among undergraduate students. This service-based, nature-based experiential learning program, termed the Ecogarden Farmer and Biodiversity Surveyor, has been running at the university since 2015. The program is divided into two consecutive phases: a training phase comprising various learning activities and a successive internship phase consisting of the all-round practical tasks involved in managing the garden. A retrospective evaluation of the program using phenomenographic approach and content analysis was adopted to reveal the diversity of students’ learning experience, as the indicators of the success of the program. Of 112 participants from 4 cohorts, 32 completed online questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews were successfully conducted with twelve participants, three from each of the four cohorts. The results indicated that the program’s outcomes could be categorized into five themes. Most outcomes fit into the theme ‘an increase in knowledge and skill level,’ followed by ‘rise in environmental awareness,’‘facilitation of personal growth,’ and ‘enhancement of career development.’ Many structural experiences revealed may suggest the success of the program. The longer the participants had participated in the program, the more in-depth and diversified reflection of the senior participants relating to personal development were mentioned. This study provides critical insights into the validity of retrospective program evaluation for assessing the long-term impact of EfS programs by introducing a cross-sectional study of different cohorts as a serial time-point sampling strategy. Copyright © 2021 Cheang, Ng, Wong, Li and Tsoi.

Can residential experiences help undergraduates develop holistic competencies? To answer this question, a study was conducted based on the insights of 211 residents in Hong Kong. Deductive and inductive content analyses were respectively used to examine residence life outcomes, particularly in holistic competencies, and to categorise the types of residential experiences deemed to be effective for these outcomes. Results revealed that participation in hall activities led to the development of residence life outcomes, including justice, humanity, wisdom, courage, transcendence, and wellbeing. Furthermore, planning/organising hall activities greatly improved students' sense of justice while interpersonal dynamics facilitated the improvement of humanity only. The analyses indicated that students without specific engagement in hall activities were also able to develop temperance, particularly in self-regulation. Recommendations are suggested based on the analyses. It is hoped that this study might help inform policy-making processes to provide better residential environment that is beneficial to student holistic development.
[Copyright of Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management is the property of Routledge.]

This chapter comparatively analyzes the most recent national curriculum guidelines for early childhood education (ECE) in Norway, Finland, China, and Hong Kong. By exploring the aims and dominant concepts in the guidelines, we aspire to better understand how governments of different cultures utilize the dominant concepts, that is, play and learning to manage and facilitate ECE and children’s development. The major data sources are the national curriculum guidelines for ECE and major policies directing and/or influencing the formulation of the guidelines. Content analysis and comparative analysis methods are utilized to analyze the documents. Through analysis and comparison, this chapter aims to inspire policy makers, practitioners, and interested parties in the four cultures and internationally to understand and reflect on their own ECE so that ECE can be better approached in their own culture as well as in settings of diverse cultures.
[Copyright of International Perspectives on Education and Society is the property of JAI Press Ltd.]

The dynamic of how civic education is framed during turbulent periods is illuminated through analysis of three Hong Kong official civic education curriculum guidelines (1985, 1996, 2012). Guidelines are publicly available, officially sanctioned statements of purpose that have particular relevance for education professionals and are used around the world to characterize educational initiatives. Our focus is on guidelines written during periods in which there was colonial hegemony by the United Kingdom (1985), an attempt to promote liberal democracy by the Hong Kongese (1996), and an assertion of Chinese nationalism (2012). We argue that guidelines about civic education are similar across these times of political turbulence. There are shifts in the content of the guidelines, but fundamental differences are not made explicit. The documents are not aligned with a theoretical framework of colonialism, liberal democracy, or Chinese nationalism, but rather, they are pragmatically oriented. The guidelines are signifiers of attempts to achieve normative stability. Copyright © 2019 College and University Faculty Assembly of National Council for the Social Studies.

This study explores whether the deficit approach to understanding youth, which has been widely critiqued in contemporary youth studies, could still be a dominant paradigm in an emerging curriculum which emphasises multiple-perspective thinking. The analysis compares the representations of youth in selected reference sources at different levels of curriculum- making of the liberal studies (LS) secondary school curriculum in Hong Kong. These include: (1) the official website of the curriculum, (2) the textbooks and (3) the teachers' verbal accounts. The findings indicate that the curriculum contents at the institutional level (the LS official website) do not really favour a deficit representation of youth, but that the contents at the program level and at the classroom level do intensify that deficit representation. The findings shed light on the discourse of youth in education regimes and inform future research.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2012.692960]

This article reports on the personal beliefs and attitudes of highly motivated Hong Kong school-age subjects who studied music. A total of 24 participants who demonstrated high achievement and interest in learning music were interviewed. Content analysis of the interview data was performed to elucidate four topics: background information about the music learning of participants, their feelings about learning music, their perceptions of parental expectations of the learning of different subjects, and music learning in schools. A detailed analysis was conducted to understand the views of participants on attainment value, task value, task difficulty and intrinsic motivation. Based on the results, a theoretical framework was derived that includes three developmental stages: (1) initial motivation, (2) short-term involvement and the learning process and (3) long-term involvement and ongoing commitment. The study contributes to the understanding of the developmental trajectory of these Asian participants by detailing intrinsic and extrinsic factors that impacted on their musical development.
[Copyright of Music Education Research is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2011.553278 ]