In Hong Kong, inclusive education is concerned with educating all students, including those who are categorised as having special educational needs (SEN). This qualitative study reports three challenges faced by primary schools music teachers required to implement inclusive education. The first two challenges echo those reported internationally ? the lack of subject-specific pre- and in-service SEN training and insufficient school-based SEN support for music teachers. The third challenge is the key role of a societal mindset that, by valuing SEN interventions against other educational values, justifies discriminatory training and resourcing. It is against this mindset that these teachers argue and that explains why inclusive education in Hong Kong's primary music classrooms becomes a pathway for both SEN students and their teachers to learned helplessness.; In Hong Kong, inclusive education is concerned with educating all students, including those who are categorised as having special educational needs (SEN). This qualitative study reports three challenges faced by primary schools music teachers required to implement inclusive education. The first two challenges echo those reported internationally ? the lack of subject-specific pre- and in-service SEN training and insufficient school-based SEN support for music teachers. The third challenge is the key role of a societal mindset that, by valuing SEN interventions against other educational values, justifies discriminatory training and resourcing. It is against this mindset that these teachers argue and that explains why inclusive education in Hong Kong's primary music classrooms becomes a pathway for both SEN students and their teachers to learned helplessness.
[Copyright of International Journal of Inclusive Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2015.1019374]

Environmental education has been widely promoted in Hong Kong schools since the 1990s. Teachers have a crucial role in educating students to be well-informed, environmentally aware and responsible green citizens. The environmental literacy and tendencies of teachers are seen as having far-reaching influences on the development of environmental education in Hong Kong. This paper aims to elucidate teachers' competence in implementing environmental education in schools through their narrative dialogues regarding their engagement in classroom practice and thinking about environmental education. The teachers were selected from a pool of teacher respondents categorised according to their scores for environmental knowledge, attitude and behaviour in a territory-wide survey of Hong Kong primary school teachers. Follow-up interviews with three teachers of varying levels were conducted to explicate their personal stories, focusing on how the teachers' knowledge-attitude-behaviour associations influence their implementation of environmental education in schools. The teachers' experiences and perspectives behind their stories provide crucial, specific baseline information, informing the development of more relevant teacher education programs in environmental education, and subsequently, enhancing environmental education in schools.
[Copyright of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2014.967111]

It is a general belief that language reflects cultural preoccupations, and constrains the way people think, and that the use of language is also shaped through culture. Language education in different countries thus reflects culture of the regions. Chinese and English are two of the most popular languages in the world and reflect culture of the East and the West. The authors have carried out a research project on the views of Hong Kong educators on basic mother tongue language competency. The results showed that Hong Kong educators’ perception on language was affected by Chinese philosophy of education, namely Confucianism. They did not find many indicators of English curricula appropriate to Hong Kong school students. ‘Stress on personal moral perfection’ and ‘social implications for education’ that is the goodness for all were some of the Chinese educational beliefs affect views of Hong Kong educators on language education.
[Copyright © 2007 International Cultural Research Network Press.]

This article reports a workshop presentation suggesting a conceptual framework of teaching soccer by adopting the TGfU approach for secondary school students in Hong Kong. It was intended to help teachers to tackle three basic questions of instruction namely, "Why to teach?", "What to teach?" and "How to teach?". Firstly, the emphasis of teaching soccer should focus on adopting experiental learning concept for cultivating the learning-to-learn skills highlighted in the current education reform. Secondly, the attacking and defending principles of soccer were assumed to develop themes as teaching content, which were the basics for all tactical concepts of soccer performance. Thirdly, teachers could make use of the teaching progression of a variety of games forms and cognitive deliberation techniques for sequencing learning experiences for students. The framework of using experiential learning as theoretical basis, developing learning-to-learn skills as possible objectives, selecting themes from attacking and defending principles as teaching content and sequencing teaching activities from the games forms and cognitive deliberation techniques served as practical guides for teachers to teach soccer by using the TGfU approach in the context of Hong Kong.
[Copyright © 2006 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

Choral singing is a key feature of musical activity in Hong Kong schools. It has grown from modest beginnings into an important part of extra-curricular work. Even in independent societies and associations, many choral directors possess backgrounds in music education and classroom teaching. The teacher education institutions are responsible for training the majority of music teachers in Hong Kong. Thus it would seem necessary for music teacher courses to feature choral training to properly equip teachers before entering the classroom and taking the role of choral director in class, school and perhaps community. In the past there has been no choral director training programme. It seems important to develop ideas for what might be included for the professional development of the student choral teacher, and this is one objective of the current study. This article reports the implementation of a mentoring scheme carried out in a primary school setting. One of the current authors and an identified school choral teacher worked as mentors to provide professional support for a student choral teacher who was selected as the main participant in the case study. The aim was to investigate the potential of mentoring as a way of training a student choral director in a real school setting. Findings from this study reveal that through the mentoring scheme the student choral teacher was provided with an opportunity to interpret, generate, interact and experiment with the choral teaching theory in a real school choral rehearsal setting. This could be seen as a process of knowing-in-action and reflection-in-action.
[Copyright © 2006 The Hong Kong Institute of Education, International Society for Music Education.]

The Arts-in-Education (AiE) Programme was an initiative that involved artists and arts organizations working closely with school teachers in the formal curriculum to enhance student learning by using an interdisciplinary approach. This three-year programme (2000–2003) was organized by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and co-organized by the Curriculum Development Institute of the Education and Manpower Bureau and the Creative Arts Department of the Hong Kong Institute of Education. It received a total of HK$4 million sponsorship donated by the Hong Kong Bank Foundation. The programme had three main aims: To facilitate partnerships between professional practicing artists and schools to create programmes that enhance the study of the arts and other curriculum areas through the arts; To provide students, through working with the artists, with greater experience with the arts, encouraging them to explore different ways of thinking and work more creatively in the arts and other subjects; To facilitate the sharing and exchanging of ideas between arts and non-arts teachers and professional artists, so they could learn new ways of approaching their topic (Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2000).
[Copyright © 2008 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.]