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.
[Copyright of Early Child Development & Care is the property of Routledge]

Civic education is considered as a way to nurture good citizens who work to develop the polity. However, in real politics, education often mirrors instead of shaping the political development. Reviewing civic education of Hong Kong from a historical development perspective, this article explains that civic education has for long been used a tool of governance by the political regimes. This was true not only during the days of colonial rule but is also that after the reversion of sovereignty in 1997. Manipulating civic education as a tool of governance can have far-reaching consequence. In the case of Hong Kong’s civic education, the problems due to neglect, deliberate suppression, and twisting around in different historical phases created the problem for the future. Hong Kong’s civic education is now stuck in a quagmire, and preparing young people to face the sociopolitical challenges becomes increasingly difficult. Finally, this article makes suggestions for reforming civic education in Hong Kong. To conduct this study, a mixed methodology was adopted which comprised both literature review and qualitative interviews with civic education teachers and teachers of the subject Liberal Studies. Selective discourses of the teachers are reported to inform the understanding of the discussion.
[Copyright © 2016 The Author(s).]

This paper aims to the analysis of civic education policy of the two governments of Hong Kong, the British Colony before 1997 and the Chinese Special Administrative Region after 1997. Hong Kong people own questionable identities, neither British citizens nor Chinese subjects. Basically, the decolonization showed that the policy of domestication was implemented during the transition period of Hong Kong where the government patronized and empowered the Hong Kong people through enhancing human rights and developing political democratization. After handing over of sovereignty, the education policy made the contents of civic education more patriotic, cultural hegemonic and national ideological. The intentions were quite obviously presented in policy documents and responded in the historical contexts. The historical comparison intends to get the expandable interpretation of the scenario of education policy in this period of Hong Kong.
[Coryright © 2014 David Publishing Company.]