The academic underachievement of ethnic minorities, especially Pakistanis, in Hong Kong is well-recognized. This is stereotypically attributed to Islamic practices that are perceived to impede education, yet the voices of Pakistani parents and children are seldom heard. This research seeks to illuminate how Pakistani Muslim immigrant students and their parents understand the role of religion in education. The key finding highlights how both parents and students rate religion and education as highly important, and maintain that the two complement—rather than contradict—each other. They reject the public perception that Islam discourages the education of females, asserting that Islam upholds equality, including gender equality. Nonetheless, and maybe paradoxically, females interviewed during this research do encounter greater challenges than males in pursuing an education. In the young women's understanding, this comes from gendered cultural practices that are not necessarily endorsed by Islam. In response, both parents and daughters fight against, or conform to, these practices.
[Copyright of Asian Anthropology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2015.1025592]

Hong Kong's Liberal Studies curriculum (implemented in 2009) aims in part to teach young people about diversity in society, including cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. This essay considers how religions and religious diversity are represented in Liberal Studies, analyzing how minority forms of religion are visible and invisible in the four most popular Liberal Studies textbook sets. The analysis will answer the questions of (1) how Hong Kong's religious diversity is expressed in the textbooks and (2) how different religions are depicted in relation to the society overall. Textbooks are the primary source material teachers use, particularly in new subjects, as reflections of prevalent attitudes, beliefs, and norms, and as formal sources of curriculum content. This essay therefore provides a glimpse of the latent knowledge about religious diversity in the educational publishing and decision-making community of Hong Kong, relating gaps in text coverage to the subject's aim of developing student understanding and appreciation of diversity.
[Copyright of Asian Anthropology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2015.1025595]

Hong Kong secondary teachers, as elsewhere, are concerned with students’ misbehaviour. In Hong Kong secondary schools, two teams of teachers, a guidance team and a discipline team, are formed to deal with this behaviour. This article examines how teachers made sense of their caring work and the strategies they adopted for behaviour management. Taking the interactionist perspective (Blumer, 1962, 1966), the framework suggested by Stebbin (1969, 1975) was adopted for exploring how teachers defined the situation in which they participated. Qualitative data were collected using interviews and classroom observation. Sixty teachers were interviewed. Eighteen classrooms were observed. The influence of the classical Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, emerging as a main theme from the data, was prominent, as its key principles were incorporated into the teachers’ personal system of caring. The findings illuminate the influence of Chinese culture in Hong Kong schools. Implications for the promotion of culturally responsive programmes for the promotion of pastoral care are drawn.

The concept of God and spirituality has often been considered crucial in the development and form of an individual’s personal faith and faith development in most of the developed western countries while little research has been done in the case of Hong Kong. The aim of this study is to trace dimensions in God concepts of preschoolers in two Hong Kong Chinese Kindergartens by documenting what young children know and believe about God and Spirituality orally and by pictures/artwork that the children drawn. Parents and teacher’s concept of God and spirituality would be examined by interviews as to see their relations with young children’s God concepts and spirituality concepts. Through a qualitative investigation on the origins of these concepts from the perspectives of two young children in a K3 class, their parents, head teacher and teachers in the form of case study, it is anticipated that a deeper understanding on the form of young children’s personal faith and spiritual development could be gained on the part of the ECE practitioners and the parents. Implications from findings could be drawn for fostering a suitable curriculum for the young children.

This is a review of the curriculum of religious education of the Catholic primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong over the last three decades. Of the subject matter of religious education, there has witnessed an obvious shift of the focus from an emphasis on transmission of biblical knowledge to the call for reflection of life experiences of students in the light of the biblical teachings. As far as the teachers are concerned, a phenomenon has persisted that most of them are not properly prepared for the job in terms of their mastery of essential subject matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. The most notable feature of the learners in the context of this study lies in the fact that over 95% of them are not baptized Catholics. The challenge of religious education in such a context has thus become a matter of relevance and attractiveness of the subject to them. Finally, the school milieu has been found not particularly favourable to religious education as academic achievement, instead of character formation, has been given top priority in even prestigious Catholic schools.