The quasi-market condition of education intensified the need to seek ongoing school improvements, manage uncertainty, and innovate school-wide pedagogy and curricula. Sequentially, interest in teachers’ entrepreneurial behavior (TEB) has grown rapidly in recent years, which established the importance of entrepreneurial behavior as an effective response to the changing, uncertain, and increasing demanding context in the education system. However, the notion of TEB has not been clearly conceptualized or operationalized. This study attempted to offer a clear definition of TEB and identify its conceptual components. We first offered a semi-systematic literature review of entrepreneurial behavior, and then conducted a multiple-site case study at three schools in Hong Kong. We identified three competency components and three attribute components of TEB, from which we established a conceptual definition of TEB. This clarification of TEB and its components enabled the linkage to prior literature and future research. Copyright © 2021 Springer Nature B.V.

This article conveys the results of a reflexive investigation of the managerial practices and entrepreneurial discourses that shape the academic trajectories of early career scholars. Beginning with the experiences of early career scholars in research‐intensive universities in Canada and Hong Kong, the authors explore some of the social and political‐economic relations that are reshaping higher education systems across the world. Drawing on experiences navigating university governance, funding and performance management processes, the authors explore how participation in the marketised relations of higher education inserts people into competition with colleagues within and beyond a single university context, instrumentalises and constrains relationships with civil sector collaborators, and produces a shared sense that nothing one does is ever enough. In this way, the article illuminates some of the ways a new global knowledge economy conditions academic life.本文探討學術管理主義和企業論述如何塑造新晉學者的學術軌跡, 並匯報相關反思性研究的結果。本文以任職加拿大和香港研究型大學的早期新晉學者為例, 開始探討一些正在重塑全球高等教育體系的社會和政治經濟關係。作者利用新晉學者如何探索大學治理、資金和績效管理流程的經驗, 從而了解高等教育界的市場化關係如何將競爭意識植入在大學界的同事之間、令到與公民社會的協作關係工具化、並產生一種感到工作慣常不達標的意識。通過上述的方法, 本文闡明了新型全球知識經濟影響學術生活的一些方式。 Copyright © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Novice kindergarten (KG) teachers often encounter various challenges that may prevent them from performing satisfactorily during the transition from school to work. In Hong Kong, this issue has become more salient under the Free Quality Kindergarten Education Scheme which induces heavier workload and higher expectation on teachers’ performance. Self-control is a crucial factor that facilitates individuals’ performance via promoting positive thoughts, emotion, and behavior as well as preventing the negative counterparts. In this research, we examined the hypotheses that novice KG teachers’ pre-existing self-control would predict better subsequent job performance through promoting work engagement and preventing work stress. Students from an early childhood education (ECE) higher diploma program reported their self-control at the final semester of the program. Those working in the ECE classrooms after graduation rated their work engagement and work stress at the end of the first month of the new semester, and those who retained in the job also reported their job performance at the end of the first semester (final N = 117, 96.6% females). The results of mediation model fully supported our hypotheses. These findings suggest that enhancing self-control, improving work engagement and reducing work stress could be promising ways to facilitate novice KG teachers’ job performance during the school-to-work transition period. Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Declining employment prospects of graduates have been reported in the international literature and in Hong Kong. This casts doubts on the ‘employability’ of graduates of an expanding higher education sector. Yet, published patterns and trends of graduate employment outcomes do not tell us much about the contextualised processes that ‘match’ or ‘mismatch’ graduates’ qualifications with ‘appropriate’ graduate jobs. This paper addresses this research gap through examining lived experience and subjectivities of college/university-to-work transition of 10 graduates of self-financing degree-awarding institutions in Hong Kong, which were derived from a study of 40 local young workers in 2018. Drawing upon ‘positioning’ and ‘processual’ perspectives on ‘employability’, this paper sheds light on the nebulous, mutually constituted nature of the skills demanded by employers in workplace. Also, highlighting the tensions discerned in interview narratives, it elucidates the difficulties for graduates to present their skills as ‘directly’ transferable to the workplace. Graduates’ interpretations of (their) ‘employability’ reveal the differential values attached to (‘technical’ vs. ‘non-technical’) skills, (degree vs. sub-degree) qualifications and (self-financing vs. publicly funded) institutions constructed in the specific context of local higher education development. Implications for further research, assessment of higher education functioning and career services are discussed. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In discussions about how to implement learning through/in/at play, there is still not a commonly agreed view. This qualitative study investigated Chinese teachers’ and parents’ perspectives on learning in play to attain a co-constructed picture of learning in play through real classroom practices and perceptions using the Mosaic approach. Fourteen teachers and six parents took part in this study. Among the participants, six kindergarten teachers were interviewed to obtain their perspectives on learning in play. They assisted the researchers in the selection of exemplary play episodes, which were filmed in their own classrooms. Four three-minute videos containing the largest amount of learning elements based on the teachers’ views were selected for further in-depth focus group discussions. The selected multivocal video-cued interview clips were shown to eight other teachers and six parents in focus groups to elicit their perspectives on learning in play. The co-constructed picture of learning in play that emerged included discipline in the classroom, more difficult and complicated learning matters, more freedom to play, and teachers’ intervention to facilitate children’s learning in play. The findings revealed different social representations of learning in play in the Hong Kong context, the contributions of which are important and useful for professional education practices and curricular policy currently undergoing reform. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s).

Moral education is not a new concept in universities; however, university students’ firsthand learning experience and valuation of moral education have not been fully explored. As part of a teaching and learning study conducted in two undergraduate classes in a Hong Kong university, this study explores the university students’ perceptions of learning moral education. Data were mainly collected through student interviews and their reflective journals. Most students supported the learning of moral education. They asserted that moral education has a lifelong nature; thus, they should learn it in universities. The study reveals that moral education can facilitate the university students’ personal and social betterments, showing the intrinsic and instrumental values of moral education. This small-scale case supplements the literature on the understanding of the development of moral education in higher education. This study also reflects the necessity to rethink the moral aim and the moral education curriculum of higher education. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

This article examines the meaning and features of ‘internationalisation’ in higher education in the social and historical contexts of Hong Kong. From a perspective of shifting geopolitics of higher education aligned with a historical perspective of evolving academic traditions, this article discerns parallel developments featuring the transition of Hong Kong universities along two pathways—benchmarking Western universities’ internationalisation agenda, and converging with China’s projection for national integration and global outreach. The HK case provides a critique of liberal views of internationalisation of higher education based on the logics of neoliberalism, soft power, global citizenship, and internationalisation at home, suggesting a closer look at statist instrumentalism in conjunction with neoliberalism as competitive strategies in a realistic international higher education community.本文探究“高等教育國際化”在香港的社會和歷史背景下所呈現的含義與特徵。研究視角著眼於高等教育的地緣政治和學術傳統之間的聯繫，分析香港高等學府發展的兩條歷史脈絡：一則參照西方國家的大學國際化範式，二則趨於中國的國家融合和全球拓展計畫。這種發展軌跡反映以國家為中心的工具主義與新自由主義的戰略結合。 Copyright © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Guided by the Boundary Activity based Learning (BABL) principle, mobile technology-supported inquiry learning activities were implemented in a primary four science class in Hong Kong. An exploratory study was conducted to examine the effects of the BABL guided inquiry activities on students' learning performance and to explore how the key element, the boundary object, operated in different learning spaces. In the study, mixed research methods were used to evaluate students' conceptual understanding and their engagement in and attitudes toward BABL activities. The reciprocal interactions of students' cognition were qualitatively analyzed in terms of the forms and functions of boundary objects in the BABL environment. The results showed that students made significant improvements in conceptual understanding and were engaged in BABL activities. The study also revealed that the generation of abstract boundary objects, together with physical boundary objects, promoted students' learning and thinking as they shuttled between the classroom and the outside. This research contributes to informing educators about how to design and implement technology-supported teaching and learning through the use of boundary objects in crossing learning contexts. Copyright © 2020 International Forum of Educational Technology & Society.

The development of children’s fundamental motor skills (FMS) is shaped by the environment surrounding them. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the changes of children’s FMS after an intervention program differed between classes conducted in different schooling conditions. Participants were 295 preschool children (62 boys, 133 girls; M = 5.4 years; SD = 0.28) from eight preschools in Hong Kong. Children participated in an 8-week FMS program and their FMS were assessed using the Test of Gross Motor Development-2 (TGMD-2). A linear mixed model was used to analyze the association on the changes of FMS score between children in different schooling conditions: (1) teaching venue size (large or small); and (2) class size (large, medium, or small), while accounting for the clustering of participants within preschools. The changes of object control skills were significantly different between groups with different teaching venue size (p = 0.000) (small: 5.54 (SD = 5.84) vs. large: 2.46 (SD = 6.42)) and different class size (p = 0.000) (small: 8.12 (SD = 6.34) vs. medium: 2.92 (SD = 6.26) vs. large: 4.00 (SD = 5.79)). The findings have practical implications for the teaching of FMS in that the social and physical environment in preschools should be considered for the design of FMS intervention programs. Copyright © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Research reveals that although teachers in English as second language (ESL) classrooms are often good at teaching language forms and skills, many are less confident about the cognitive engagement required to develop critical thinking skills. However, little research has been done to examine the development of critical thinking in the context of second-language learning and teaching. In this article, I report the results of a study that assesses the effectiveness of a program called Philosophy in Schools (PIS) in developing students’ critical thinking and English proficiency in Hong Kong. In the study, I provided training and support for five teachers in two schools so that they could teach PIS to their secondary 3 and 4 ESL students during integrated humanities and English lessons respectively. I found that PIS played an important role in promoting the students’ critical thinking and enhanced the development of their English proficiency to a significant extent. Copyright © 2020 by Francis W. Parker School, Chicago. All rights reserved.