Following the return of sovereignty to China in 1997, education reform in Hong Kong has been initiated and implemented on a massive scale. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government has made a concerted effort to improve the quality of education through the reforms, a point witnessed by the creation of a number of different policies and strategies over the course of the past decade. This chapter reviews the music curriculum reforms of 2002, and examines how education policy has impacted on school practices as a result. In the process, various issues, including the place of music in the school curriculum, assessment for learning, the motivation to learn, the nurturing of creativity, and the balance between Western and Chinese culture, are all examined.

Art education in Hong Kong has undergone various changes in response to educational reform. In art assessment, a major change in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum is the inclusion of art criticism as a compulsory component of the new public examination. Assessing students’ abilities to interpret art in an art criticism public examination context is a critical issue in Hong Kong because the new senior secondary curriculum and assessment has brought attention to the role of written language in the art examination paper. This means the examination assesses not only students’ abilities to interpret art, but also their language abilities required to respond to art in written form. Since this new mode of assessment of art criticism has been published a number of issues have appeared. Recent studies show that teachers and students perceive this development negatively and they believe that the written format will assess students’ written language abilities rather than their critical abilities. These findings challenge the justification of the new art assessment policy and raise questions about the role of written language in responding to art. This article aims to raise the issue of the marriage between language and art criticism in the Hong Kong public examination context. It argues and examines the relationship of language to art interpretation, reasoning in the assessment, and issues in the public art criticism examination context. The issues addressed in this article provide opportunities for researchers and policy makers to reconsider and refine the new form of examination.
[Copyright © 2017 The Author. Ijade © 2017 NSEAD/John Wiley & Sons Ltd.]

This study investigates how a Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s secondary school teacher developed and implemented global citizenship education by adapting a spiral teaching model of empathy, experiential learning and classroom-based inquiry learning activities in two teaching cycles. One key aim of Hong Kong’s education reform is to prepare students for challenges in a globalization age. This case study used action research on two different cohorts of about 36 students in two school years’ teaching cycles (2013–2014 and 2014–2015). The students were taught by a secondary school teacher with an aim of cultivating their empathy through experiential learning in authentic contexts. The author participated as a researcher who observed and facilitated the evaluation. The learning topic is ‘understanding poverty’ in this interdisciplinary junior secondary PSHE subject. The findings reveal that through an adaptation of empathy learning model, even junior secondary school students can develop perspective-taking empathy with experiential learning and classroom-based inquiry learning activities. Also, whereas the first teaching cycle started with experiencing different contexts of poverty before having classroom inquiry learning activities, the second teaching cycle started with exposing students to multiple quantitative and narrative descriptions of poverty and to investigate stories of those affected by poverty before having experiential learning of different contexts of poverty. There was a higher level of empathy by those students who were exposed to prior background and conceptual understanding before engaging in authentic learning. But the two cohorts of students could achieve the learning objectives of seeing through others’ perspectives, making imagined connections between their lives and the lives of others who are less fortunate, linking the local and the global by analyzing how the global economic restructuring affects the local lives, and fostering their willingness

The purpose of the chapter is to review the past and present situation of teaching musicianship in Hong Kong schools as a background, identify a number of current issues, and propose a number of paradigm shifts that seem to be taking place in Hong Kong at the turn of this new century. In doing so, the chapter not only provides a general historical overview of how Hong Kong school music has traditionally been taught with implications for present practice, but, more importantly, attempts to draw implications on the development of musicianship skills that need to be considered by present day teachers and educational planners alike.
[Copyright © 2003 the author.]

Innovation in pedagogy by technology integration in kindergarten classroom has always been a challenge for most teachers. This design-based research aimed to explore the feasibility of using Augmented Reality (AR) technology in early art education with a focus on the gains and pains of this innovation. A case study was conducted in a typical kindergarten in Hong Kong, with a class of four- to five-year-old children (N=30) and their class teacher, ICT teacher as well as two parent volunteers. A series of art education activities using AR was designed and implemented in the class. Effectiveness of the activities was evaluated through a triangulation of semi-structured interviews with teachers, principal and parents, and surveys administered to children. The results indicated that (1) all the children could design, control and interact with the animated objects generated by the AR application; (2) all the stakeholders interviewed were supportive of this pedagogical innovation and (3) the principal, teachers and parents were concerned about the side effects of using AR in early childhood education. Possible improvements and implications to AR-based art education were also addressed.
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