This special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory considers the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement as an educational event, which has impacted attitudes and outlooks and conceptions of young people’s role, of education, and of society. This essay serves as an introduction to the more substantive pieces that follow. It describes two alternative perspectives on youth civic engagement in Hong Kong historically; and in so doing, it addresses some of the challenges related to free academic expression that hinder scholarly research and publishing on the area of Hong Kong-China relations looking into the future. It concludes with a brief glimpse of the contributions that follow. Copyright © 2016 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.

Private supplementary tutoring has long been a major phenomenon in parts of East Asia, including Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. In recent times it has grown dramatically in other parts of Asia and in Africa, Europe and North America. The factors underlying the growth of private tutoring vary, but in all settings it has major implications for learning and livelihood. Families with the necessary resources are able to secure not only greater quantities but also better qualities of private tutoring. Children receiving such tutoring are then able to perform better in school, and in the long run to improve their lifetime earnings. By contrast, children of low‐income families who do not receive such benefits may not be able to keep up with their peers and may drop out of school at an earlier age. Tutoring also of course has a direct impact on the livelihoods of the tutors, providing employment and incomes for a range of professionals and amateurs of different age groups. The dynamics of inter‐relationships are complex, and vary from one setting to another. This paper argues that private supplementary tutoring deserves much more attention from policy makers and researchers.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057920601024974]

This paper describes a research project investigating the workplace learning experience of information technology (IT) workers in Hong Kong. The research project explored in depth the workplace learning experiences of 65 IT workers from three different work sites. It went beyond the identification of workplace learning methods and resources workers used at work by probing into the complexities of workplace learning processes and the theoretical issues of workplace learning. A qualitative approach was used, relying primarily on data collected via in-depth interviews. This paper reports that (1). IT workers found troubleshooting, project work and installation of hardware and software, the most likely contexts to produce significant learning; and that (2). the rapid pace of technological growth in the IT industry results in a different learning environment to traditional industries such as tailoring, thus raising questions about the applicability of the notion of the community of practice as proposed by Lave and Wenger. Furthermore, by probing into the processes of known workplace learning methods such as learning from colleagues and vendors, this study uncovered many interesting findings about the workplace learning experience of IT workers.
[Copyright of Studies in Continuing Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01580370802097728 ]