Purpose: This study aims to offer authors’ humble yet unique experiences about developing an undergraduate sociology programme in an increasingly divided city.Design/methodology/approach: In this study, the authors reflect upon the development of a new sociology programme in Hong Kong in which a wide spectrum of expectations from different stakeholders, together with their own sense of mission towards sociology education, have set a very challenging stage.Findings: Developing an undergraduate sociology programme has never been easy, and there is no self-complacence as far as developing a programme that is of both academic and social values.Originality/value: This paper offers a first-hand account of how sociology educators have developed a new sociology programme in a unique social context. Copyright © 2023 Emerald Publishing Limited.

Purpose: National identification among young people and the issues about how national education should be conducted have been the significant topics when the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was entering its third decade of the establishment. This paper was written based on data the authors obtained upon participation in a project organized by the Centre for Catholic Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The project was carried out after the official curriculum, known as the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide, was shelved due to popular resentment. The project aimed at capturing the timely opportunity for substantial resources available for school-based operation of moral and national education and developing an alternative curriculum about teaching national issues and identification for Catholic Diocese and Convent primary schools to adopt. This paper aims to investigate the nature of this Catholic Project and examines the extent to which it is a counterhegemonic project or one for teaching to belong to a nation (Mathews, Ma and Lui, 2007). It assesses the project's possible contribution to citizenship and national education in Hong Kong, since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide.Design/methodology/approach: The authors of this paper worked in an education university of Hong Kong and were invited to be team members of this Catholic Project. The role comprised proposing topics for teacher training, conducting seminars, giving comments to teaching resources, observing and giving feedback to schools that tried out the teaching and designing/implementing an evaluative survey and conducting follow-up interviews with involved parties such as teachers and key officials of the Catholic Centre. Given this, the research involved can be perceived as action research. This paper was written up with both the qualitative and quantitative data the authors collected when working the project.Findings: This paper reported a Catholic

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare the curriculum developments of civic education in three emerging Chinese societies: China and two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao, which are increasingly under the impacts of globalisation in this information world.Design/methodology/approach: The analytical method is used and the following are identified: active and global civic education-related learning units and key themes and main contents in official curriculum guidelines and updated textbooks related to civic education.Findings: A major finding is that elements of both active and global citizenship, such as participation in the community and understanding about the world and thus forming multiple identities, can be found alongside their emphasis on enhancing national citizenship. Thus, ideas of global citizenship and multiple levels of citizenship from local, national to global start to develop in these three Chinese societies.Social implications: The implications of such findings of both active and global citizenship, as well as multiple identities, found in these three Chinese societies could be huge for informing civic literature and sociological point of views, in particular, pointing to the next generations receiving a broadened and transcended notion of multiple levels of citizenship, apart from local and national citizenship.Originality/value: The significance of this paper is that it argues that ideas of active citizenship in terms of community participation and global citizenship have been found in China, Hong Kong and Macao civic education curriculum and textbooks because of the expectations placed on students to compete in a globalized world, though national citizenship and patriotic concerns have been primary concerns. Globalisation makes the world society by impacting on these three Chinese societies for active and global citizenship, though they still retain their particular curricular focusses. Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing