Purpose: This article explores the roles and the expertise of Hong Kong in the internationalization of public administration education.Design/methodology/approach: The methodology is based on the data of 5 internationalization initiatives of one Hong Kong university with its internationalization partners in Macau, Korea, Australia, Russia and Finland. The data obtained lasted for a period of 18 months, from September 2019 to March 2021.Findings: The finding of this study revealed that (1) there are 5 “pubtropolis roles” (roles of a public administration metropolis) of Hong Kong in the internationalization of public administration education in China, Asia, Asia-Pacific, Belt-and-Road and Europe. The findings also revealed that (2) Hong Kong served as a pubtropolis with its “5C” expertise in curriculum innovation, customized training, competence framework, competence assessment and comparative policy.Research limitations/implications: As the methodology of this article is based on the data of 5 internationalization initiatives of one Hong Kong university by one academia only, further studies can be conducted at department, faculty or university level for multiple academia.Practical implications: There are two practical implications: (1) The more the roles of a city, the broader the view in its internationalization of public administration initiatives; (2) Hong Kong could further tap on its expertise in “5C” in public administration: curriculum innovation, customized training, competence framework, competence assessment and comparative policy to exert its “geo-management” power.Social implications: This article argues that public services can be improved by the setting up of “Sabbatical Leave Scheme for Internationalization of Public Administration” by respective governments to sustain the impacts observed.Originality/valueIt is from the author's original work. Copyright © 2022 Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

This study, adopting the Foucauldian lenses of citizenship, investigates how a group of students understand the prevailing social discourses and how such understanding and perceptions influence students’ sense of citizenship and coping strategies. Drawing on in-depth individual interviews with 28 participants from six universities in Hong Kong, the findings suggest that multiple factors have impacts on the university students’ sense of citizenship, including the media as technologies to shape citizenship, the essentialized ideological differences as an apparatus of intervention to shape and act upon individuals, and the legitimacy and discordance of opinions among individuals within both physical and virtual communities. The participants were found to gradually develop an awareness of the discursive construction of the social. They were found to search for their sense of citizenship through (a) opting for one ideological stance and/or keeping silent to avoid being othered within the social discourses existing at the social, community, and family levels; (b) adopting different coping strategies when dealing with their confusion towards conflicting comments; or (c) developing news reading literacy and coming to the realization of the role media plays in discursively constructing new citizens and exercising influence over existing and potential members of communities. The implications of the findings for curriculum design and policy making to develop support measures to facilitate students’ positive learning and whole-person development are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Springer.

This article investigates types of citizenship education in selected schools in Hong Kong with different overarching affiliations (pro-China vs. pro-democracy). After examining schools’ policies (e.g., sister school of China school), we selected four pro-China and two pro-democracy schools. As a highly diverse society, citizenship education in Hong Kong is key to the formation of a ‘good citizen’. To better understand what a ‘good citizen’ means in this context, we interviewed ten teachers, four principals and four vice-principals at six secondary schools. We focused our interviews on key themes around citizenship, schools influence and media influence. These interviews showed that laissez-faire school staff reported acting as facilitators who emphasized knowledge, social concerns and norms of ‘good citizens’ to their students. Mediate diversity staff reported helping students integrate different perspectives. School mission staff reported supporting student engagement via citizen responsibilities and political processes; while pro-China schools emphasized a national China identity, pro-democracy schools emphasized an international view. Staff from all of these schools reported that media negatively influenced students’ values and perspectives. To reduce students’ confirmation bias (only seeking evidence to support the pre-existing views), teachers in all schools taught critical thinking skills and media literacy. The data showed that understanding how schools can nurture student-citizens amid teachers’ concerns around negative media influence can help inform instruction and policies in schools regardless of their affiliation. Copyright © 2022 Intellect Ltd.

Experiential learning can take many forms, but in all cases, teachers play a necessary role in the process. Consequently, nurturing teachers to be critically minded reflective professionals is paramount. This study uses two case studies to identify both the difficulties encountered when offering experiential learning to learners and the advantages to be gained from the process. One case study involves a teacher guiding Hong Kong students in experiential learning which took place at a national level in Mainland China. His approaches aligned with Justice Oriented and Charity Oriented. The second case study concerns a teacher who herself undertook experiential learning at a global level in Africa. Her approaches aligned with Personal Development Oriented and Justice Oriented. Their journeys are described in order to add to the fairly recent knowledge field regarding experiential learning and to help teachers become more skilled at managing experiential learning, particularly outside the local context. We suggest to add facilitating and hindering factors into the two dimensional typologies of experiential learning for civic education. The new three dimensional typologies of experiential learning would provide a more comprehensive conceptual framework to guide teachers and researchers in organizing and conducting experiential learning activities and studies. Copyright © 2021 Association for Moral Education.

This presentation aims at sharing the quantitative and qualitative findings of a pilot project on promoting the perspectives of teaching digital citizenship education in Hong Kong secondary schools. This pilot project also aims at supporting in-service teachers in professional development on curriculum development and teaching methods. Twenty teachers from seven Hong Kong secondary schools joined this pilot project and attended professional development training workshops in the school year of 2019/20. The training workshops delivered several digital citizenship related concepts to the teachers, such as the meanings of digital citizenship, media literacy, digital commerce, digital footprint, digital etiquette, and cyberbullying. Our professional team supported teachers to design their school-based digital citizenship curriculum for trial teaching and to discuss feasible teaching methods after the training workshops. By conducting pre-and-post quantitative tests after the training workshops, there is a significant statistical difference in preference of teaching digital citizenship in terms of digital law, digital commerce, and digital security and safety. Teachers are more convinced and willing to teach digital citizenship education topics after received teacher training, especially on digital commerce and digital law. Next, the qualitative interviews conducted after observing their classroom teaching revealed there is an urgent need to equip students with media literacy, e-commerce, and digital security in a social situation affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially since there are fake stories on social and political issues. In fact, people are increasingly used to buy daily necessities, obtain social and political information, and make judgements through the internet and social media, and they could be exposed to risks of personal data, fake information and stories, and online fraud unconsciously. Suggestions are made on reviewing the secondary school curriculum

Socio-political changes and curriculum reforms in Hong Kong pose new challenges to civic education. These challenges can influence “principals’ reorientation and development of practices” (Szeto, 2020, p. 2), teacher autonomy and self-efficacy (*Wong et al., 2020) in different ways across schools. The National Security Law (NSL) in Hong Kong (implemented in July 2020) increases social uncertainty over academic autonomy and could influence teacher attitudes toward civic education. Hence, this study examines principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of citizenship education and how their schools support civic teaching in times of stress. Principals influence the civic environments of their schools (Author et al., 2020), and teachers affect the civic environments of their classrooms (Author et al., 2018b). Understanding principals’ and teachers’ perceptions of citizenship education could provide insights for nurturing students to live in a complex world. The findings revealed principals were more positive than teachers in regard to their schools and citizenship education, and attempted to provide teachers with the autonomy to facilitate civic teaching. Teachers perceived more strongly than principals that the Chinese national government has influenced their schools’ attitude to citizenship education and they showed less confidence than principals in the possibility of nurturing students’ patriotism. Copyright © 2022 CitEdEV.

This paper draws on Basil Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse and practice to explain the controversy surrounding civic education in Hong Kong, through the case of a compulsory secondary school subject called Liberal Studies (LS). The distinct advantage of a Bernsteinian approach is that its conceptual grammar cogently captures the contentious nature of LS and locates the structural autonomy of teachers. This article highlights the fragmented nature of the LS curriculum, which attests to a historical legacy of the Hong Kong education system that favours a subject-based curriculum in practice and a managerialist approach to teacher staffing. These institutional parameters exert profound influences on LS teachers’ modalities of practice. This study contributes to the burgeoning interest in applying Bernsteinian scholarship to the East-Asian region by nuancing the role of teachers in mediating the contentious LS curriculum and implementing civic education. Finally, further application of the Bernsteinian approach will be discussed. Copyright © 2021 Taylor & Francis Ltd.