This paper focuses on the impact of globalization in the domain of higher education, particularly, design education. It reviews how globalization may affect educational policy and planning in Hong Kong by drawing on an empirical study involving senior management, a course leader and a design trainer/facilitator. This paper not only illustrates the challenges of globalization to education sectors worldwide, but also brings the merits of globalization in education to the fore and considers the challenges that it presents to multidimensional phenomena. The diversity of curricula; professional mobility; accountability and quality remain as parts of a continuing dialogue in the context of the global community. Research into these issues could trigger and influence thinking on how local design education (in the tertiary and higher education sectors) might be restructured to satisfy educators' hopes and desires for an ideal future in which design is promoted as being more imaginative, innovative, and eliciting wider responses to ideas, experiences, feelings, emotions, and intercultural cooperation in a globalizing world in both developed and developing nations. Rich data were collected through a series of individual interviews with design students, teaching staff and design practitioners together with a focus group discussion with key members of a curriculum planing team. This data were analyzed with reference to current literature on globalization, education reform and course planning strategy. The author was inspired by the fact that globalization drives changes in education towards global perspectives. However, institutions, society, stakeholders and the public, as well as governments in this global world, should be sharing the goal of ever-increasing excellence in teaching combined with concern for local and global contexts. The impact of globalization on education (design education) is a subject of debate and discourse within the whole global community.
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The present study aims at further examining an interesting finding of a recent empirical research on Hong Kong adults' participation in African drumming from a sociological perspective by adopting some Bourdieuan concepts. Results of the semi-structured interviews with 82 informants with diverse musical backgrounds and occupations concur that African drumming was hardly evident in Hong Kong before 1991, but related learning programmes have burgeoned in recent years. This study finds that the rise of African drumming among adult music learners over the past two decades in Hong Kong where the African residents only amount to a very small proportion (less than 0.3%) of the total population is the consequence of the two-phase habituation of a receptive attitude towards the ethnic musical tradition. The new habitus has been gradually formulated by highly acknowledged individual and group, first in the field of professional education of percussionists and later in the field of community music, where the cultural capital of African drumming has been increasingly convertible into symbolic capital and economic returns.
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Donald Schon's theory of reflective learning (1983, 1987) has been the model of professional education for decades. Yet little research is done to examine the role of practitioners as part-time teachers in professional education in light of his ideas. This research investigated four programmes of professional education in Hong Kong: (a) a master degree in journalism, (b) a top-up degree in architecture, (c) a professional diploma in architecture, and (d) a higher diploma in visual communication (design). Interviews were conducted with teachers and students. The results confirm Schon's (1983, 1987) concepts about the experiential and artistic nature of professional education, in which coaching and mentoring in practicum are the most effective pedagogy. As development of Schon's theory, the role of practitioner-educators, in the use of professional experience and knowledge rather than textbook in helping students to develop reflective practice, is critical in bridging the gap between the academic and professional worlds. These findings indicated the importance of a restructuring of curriculum and pedagogy and the institutionalization of the role of practitioners as part-time teachers, in order to improve professional education.
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