The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 has brought tremendous challenges to higher education teaching and learning. Much attention has been put on online course construction and delivery to ensure the effectiveness of online learning. However, higher education assessment deserves more attention as it is also significantly impacted by the sudden switch from face-to-face to online. To examine how higher education institutions responded to the challenges in higher education assessment during the pandemic, this chapter conducted a case study of postgraduate programs at Lingnan University (LU) in Hong Kong to explore an appropriate assessment framework for online learning in a liberal arts education context. Through a quantitative approach, this study surveyed taught postgraduate students to explore the effectiveness, efficiency, and fairness of the assessment approaches applied by LU faculty members in the online and hybrid-mode classes. This case study aims to provide insights for improving higher education assessment under the pandemic crisis. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

This paper focused on students’ learning experiences in a flipped data science class integrated with peer instruction and just-in-time teaching. University students in Hong Kong participated in the research during the pandemic. Students’ perceptions of the flipped learning mode were investigated by a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire. According to the results, most students felt they enjoyed learning with the flipped mode since it allowed them to learn flexibly and independently. The course materials (i.e., instructional videos, lecture notes, and in-class exercises) were well-designed, and students perceived the materials were useful and user-friendly. As suggested by the students, more time should be given to the pre-class learning activities. Based on the suggestions, the researchers provide practical implications on improving teaching in the flipped science class. This study demonstrates how to flip a data science class and proves its value on students’ learning, providing implications for using flipped learning during the pandemic period. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

This chapter discusses a service learning course using combined board game activities and direct social skill teaching to enhance social and communicative skills of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Ten students with ASD/social and emotional problems (aged 6–8) were invited to participate in an 8-week after-school training programme in a Hong Kong ordinary school. Each session was divided into two parts with 30 min of direct social skills instruction conducted by a teacher, followed by 60 min of board games facilitated by undergraduate students who were attending a social service learning course in a university. Most students with ASD engaged in playing board games and could apply the social and communicative skills that they learned in the training programmes. Facilitators also reported an increase in comprehension skills of students with ASD. Copyright © 2022 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Online and blended learning (OBL) requires a different skill set than face-to-face teaching. The ability to facilitate student-centered teaching by integrating technological information and communication technology (ICT) in pedagogically effective ways is urgently needed. This study explored the microlearning experience of twelve English as a second language teachers at a Hong Kong university as a form of teacher professional development (TPD) to prepare them for the transition to OBL during the COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative data was collected through semi-structured interviews to capture a holistic overview of teachers’ experience with bite-size, practical, and easily digestible TPD directly relevant to teachers’ practice. The findings indicate that teachers found the microlearning TPD activities to be quick, relevant, and engaging; they provided practical knowledge and confidence. Such activities are suggested to create favorable conditions to equip teachers with the necessary skills in OBL. Effective TPD for English as a second language teachers should focus on improving digital competence through short learning activities situated in the specific teaching context and providing input through activities in various modalities. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Previous studies on English private tutoring (EPT) have mainly focused on students and tutors who directly engaged in it. However, as EPT is a paid service and it is usually provided outside of school, parents are also important stakeholders of EPT, but EPT research has so far focused less on them. This chapter examines Chinese parents’ agency in their children’s English learning in EPT. Fourteen parents from Hong Kong and 11 from Nanchang participated in two studies respectively. These two studies adopted similar research methods by collecting data through semi-structured interviews which, from an ecological perspective, provide further evidence of the complex nature of parents’ agency in their children’s learning. Although all the parents in the two studies supported their children to attend EPT programmes, they enacted their agency differently, depending on the affordances and constraints they perceived in the situated contexts. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Little attention has been given to computer-assisted language teaching (CALL) lecturers in community colleges in Hong Kong. In this chapter, we present a novel study of CALL lecturers’ emotions and well-being while coping with emergency remote teaching (ERT) at a community college in Hong Kong during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, this study sheds light on emergency CALL teaching design and technical preparation, as well as synchronous and asynchronous online teaching and assessment in this context. We employed interviews to give vivid accounts of four CALL lecturers’ inner voices. The resulting data were coded and grouped into themes, and we report the findings as narrative accounts from the representative lecturers and in-depth thematic descriptions. We found that, overall, the CALL lecturers were stressed and overworked, and their physical conditions, especially eyesight, were impaired due to long-term online activities. They were also concerned about the quality of delivery, student feedback, student learning outcomes, and privacy issues. The analysis further revealed practical strategies that the lecturers adopted to address the difficulties they faced during the pandemic. Based on these strategies and the interviews, we present a conceptual emergency adjustment (EA) model to help understand the experiences, emotions, and well-being of CALL lecturers in community colleges in Hong Kong under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This research offers a significant contribution to the EA literature and the contextual adaptation of CALL lecturers in Hong Kong and elsewhere. In addition, the use of narrative accounts to present data could contribute to methodological developments in studying teaching and learning in an ERT environment. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

An exploration of children’s lifeworlds must necessarily go beyond school, to consider children’s everyday out-of-school lives. In this chapter, we focus on the out-of-school activities of Year 4 (9- and 10-year-old) children in the global cities of Melbourne, Hong Kong, and Singapore. We draw on survey responses from 627 children to consider their activities on weekdays after school and weekends, as well as their enjoyment of these activities. Leisure activities were most common across the cities, which are likely to be easily accessible to children, along with the academic activity of homework. To provide a closer reflection on children’s lifeworlds, we also explore the out-of-school activities of one child in each city, drawing on data (re)produced as a re-enactment of their Thursday afternoons, and a discussion of their regular activities across a week. We suggest similarities amongst the children’s activities may be partly attributed to shared features of their lives, such as their age and positioning as children, temporality, school attendance, and location in a global city, rather than constituting a universal global childhood. We also reflect on the need to consider diversity amongst children within cities to provide a more complex picture of children’s everyday out-of-school lifeworlds. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

This chapter draws on the Global Childhoods ethnographic data from Year 4 classrooms in Hong Kong, Melbourne and Singapore to elucidate what everyday learning looks like in the three global cities. Acknowledging that learning assumes varied shapes and forms, our primary focus aims to explicate some key features of everyday classroom life in each city, with a focus on time and space. In doing so, we examine the class timetables and explore how time was organised in the schools, and consider the design of classrooms and playgrounds, including the ways in which these spaces were typically used by students and teachers to create learning opportunities. Our analyses are situated within the position of critical onto-epistemological perspective though which we offered critical insights to provoke new understandings about how educational practices are deeply situated within local sociocultural contexts with greater implications for broader learning outcomes and students’ educational success. We seek to provide discussions that are both critical and comparative for rethinking the ways in which opportunities, challenges and diversity in the three education systems became evident from the classroom ethnographies. We also consider the implications of structured learning for shaping children’s multiple ways of being, belonging and becoming learners. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

This chapter considers the articulation of education discourse through visual representations of curriculum policies in Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore under the umbrella of the Global Childhoods project. We are concerned with the ways that policy and culture are co-implicated in the everyday lives of children in global cities. We explore how, in contexts of high-stakes testing, rankings and intense competition, discourses of education are depicted in officially produced visual texts. Texts selected for analysis here focus on curriculum content, learning, and the imagined skills and characteristics of idealised learner-citizens. Drawing insights from social semiotics and using Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality, we show how these visual policy texts represent education in broadly instrumentalist terms concerned with “what” and “who” is being taught in a nation’s schools. In all three study sites, these concerns connect to broader economic and social goals, and tacitly reiterate ideologically inflected narratives concerned with the purposes and potential of education. We highlight distinctions between visual policy texts that acknowledge education as an interconnected human endeavour, and those that rely on imagery and bounded lists. We also argue that such images and lists are largely devoid of reference to the students, teachers and societies. Copyright © 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

In Chinese societies, Chinese identity is an important yet controversial topic. This book examines official understandings of Chinese identity in Mainland China and Hong Kong, exploring how the latest governments of Mainland China and Hong Kong conceptualize Chinese identity; how government-endorsed textbooks frame it in different subjects; and how a multicultural approach can enhance understanding of identity in both societies. Using content analysis to support his theoretical arguments, Lin offers an in-depth, updated, and detailed picture of how the governments of Mainland China and Hong Kong, and their endorsed textbooks, encourage people in these societies to respond to the question of “who are we?”. He also elaborates on how the current approach to understanding Chinese identity can be harmful, and examines how a multicultural approach could better fit these Chinese contexts and enhance understanding of “who are we?”. Given that the question of identity causes trouble everywhere, and many countries are debating approaches to understanding diverse identities in their own societies, this book provides valuable insights into the Chinese perspective, to allow readers to more fully understand global frameworks of identity. This book will interest researchers and students in the fields of multiculturalism, multicultural education, national identity, identity politics, and China and Hong Kong studies. Copyright © 2023 Jason Cong Lin.