This narrative study explored pre-service teachers’ critical learning experiences in Hong Kong during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement and how these experiences transformed their perspectives on the teaching profession. Forty pre-service teachers participated in the study, including 16 local participants and 24 originally from mainland China. Using Jarvis’s transformative learning model, this study identified four categories of narratives: society-centred, person-centred, relation-centred, and witness-lens narrative accounts. These narratives demonstrated the participants’ various approaches during the transformation process, including reflection, emotion, and self-identification. Changes resulting from these experiences varied from radical perspective-taking to no change occurring. The Hong Kong locals mainly presented society-centred narrative accounts, whereas the majority of participants from mainland China reported person-centred narrative accounts. Their varied previous lifeworld experiences and self-identification explained the differences. The present study highlights the importance of including emotion and identity instead of taking a single constructive perspective when explaining the process of transformative learning. In addition, it shows that the process and outcomes of transformation do not naturally follow a positive direction of growth. Future studies should examine teacher’s transformation using a narrative approach and longitudinal design. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s).

As Philosophy for Children (P4C) is increasingly favored as an educational approach in other regions, the absence of P4C in traditional schools in Hong Kong raises controversy regarding its benefits for Hong Kong students. This paper investigates the potential of implementing P4C in Hong Kong by exploring the features of values education in Hong Kong primary schools. The study employs Stake’s curriculum evaluation model for systematic evaluation and suggests that P4C helps bridge the gap between the Intended Curriculum and the Observed Curriculum in the Transactions and Outcomes aspect, addressing the shortcomings of Moral and Civic Education (MCE). This study discusses the possibility of using the P4C approach for values education by comparing P4C and MCE educational principles, pedagogies, and learning outcomes. The two share similarities, indicating the possibility of integrating P4C into values education. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). 

This study highlights the role of educators in the resistance to Hong Kong's National Security Education (NSE) amidst waves of political repression in the wake of the anti-extradition movement of 2019-2020. Education reforms, teacher training and student assessment used to cultivate students' creativity, critical thinking and independent thinking skills. NSE, which emphasises China's perspective of knowledge construction, has contradicted long-standing pedagogies of teaching and learning. The research questions are: How do politically liberal educators navigate these changes? Do they conform and/or resist? Based on the study of social media and interviews with 22 politically liberal former and current teachers, school librarians, educators in public organisations and professors of teacher training programmes, I find that beneath the public transcripts of compliance in schools, there is a repertoire of 'winning quietly' among educators in Hong Kong by training students' 'civil society competence' using less politically sensitive issues, working perfunctorily on NSE-related tasks, using metaphors, jokes and prayers to convey hidden messages, and allowing students to engage in resistance. Classrooms and private online groups remain the third space for atomised resistance. Outside Hong Kong, educators openly counter the ideological influence under NSE both individually and collectively, enabling an alternative to NSE that can reach students in Hong Kong. This study illuminates that authoritarian governments never fully control the stage, and it is too soon to tell whether their attempts to create obedient citizens will prevail. Copyright ©2023 Sage Publications Ltd.

To advance the implementation of civic education curriculum, understanding what young people perceive as a "good citizen" is of great importance. The current study takes a quantitative approach to analyse the results of three civic education studies conducted by The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1999, 2009, and 2016, while combining the results of qualitative in-depth interviews with Hong Kong students, to explore the changes in Hong Kong students' perceptions of the "good citizen" since the handover. The study found that the changes in Hong Kong students' understanding of the "good citizen" have followed an "inverted-V" (rising in the beginning and then subsequently falling) trend. It is largely a reflection of debate between pro-democracy and pro-China camps under Hong Kong' hybrid regime. Copyright © 2023 Routledge.

The internationalization of higher education has become a key policy within the global higher education sector. Yet a large body of literature suggests that simply having a diverse group of students does not guarantee meaningful intercultural engagement. This paper presents a qualitative study intended to gain a richer understanding of Hong Kong's higher education environment. In-depth interview data were collected from students of different cultural backgrounds and from academic, non-academic, and managerial staff at three Hong Kong universities. The data collection period covered local political turmoil in Hong Kong as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. Results indicate that, due to language barriers and potentially opposing political ideologies, all students faced challenges engaging with others who were culturally different from themselves. These findings can facilitate the development of an adaptable cross-institutional framework for meaningful intercultural learning. Copyright © 2023 Comparative and International Education Society.

Neoliberalism has permeated every sphere of social life, including education and language learning, seeking to produce a particular kind of subject, homo economicus , with the dispositions required to manage the self as an economic project. This article unravels the workings of the unfulfilled promise of neoliberal English education and its damaging consequences on a high-achieving female university graduate in the context of contemporary Hong Kong. Combining Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives, while simultaneously drawing on Goffman's concepts of stigma and spoiled identity, our analysis is informed by positioning theory and captures the impact of what we have termed the English language gaze on our informant's sense of self. Seen through a Foucauldian lens, the data reveal the extent, but also the limits, of her assimilation of neoliberal governmentality, while the Marxist lens allows us to account for her plight in terms of alienation and the resulting stigma of a spoiled identity. Copyright © 2023 Cambridge University Press.

This chapter aims to explore the novelty and utility of political economy discourse, termed “neo-statism,” as an analytical lens for comparative research in higher education. Analysis is framed within the context of Hong Kong’s transition from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region under China’s sovereignty, and its shifting academic paradigms from a more or less spontaneous philosophy rooted in liberal capitalist economy to embracing neo-statism, which involves market-conforming and state-sponsored approaches to economic and social restructuring whereby the state regulates higher education in support of national integration and global power projection. The statist regulation depends heavily on its deployment of discursive legitimacy, strategic distribution of resources, organizational synergy, and elite cohesion articulated through higher education policy, research projects, and cross-border academic exchange and cooperation. The Hong Kong case suggests that comparative research in higher education should advance from the methodological aspects of the comparative approach to exploring wider theoretical spectrum, for understanding emerging politico-economic factors shaping academic paradigm in comparative contexts. Copyright © 2024 The authors.

This study explores Chinese secondary students’ intentions for future political participation drawing on samples of students from Mainland China and Hong Kong. Political participation examined in this study includes both conventional participation (legal protest, electoral participation and informal participation) and unconventional participation (illegal protest). Previous studies of adoles-cents’ political participation intentions have mainly been concerned with democratic regimes while this study focuses on authoritarian and hybrid regimes, such as those in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Adopting a comparative and quantitative methodology, this study utilized secondary data analysis with large samples. This study found that students from both societies showed a weak endorsement of illegal protest but a strong endorsement of all three types of conventional participation. Mainland Chinese students demonstrated a stronger endorsement of conventional participation than their Hong Kong counterparts. To understand inner-group difference, students were clustered into four groups (Alienated-Radical Participators, Supportive-Active Participators, Loyal-Minimal Participators and Critical-Active Participators) based on their political attitudes (political trust and political efficacy) and intentions for future political participation. Results suggest that Hong Kong had more Alienated-Radical Participators while Mainland China had more Supportive-Active Participators. In general, Mainland Chinese students were more regime-supporting and Hong Kong students were more regime-challenging. Copyright © 2023 Intellect Ltd Article.

港澳兩地的公民教育事關“一國兩制”戰略方針，對增強學生的國家觀念與歸屬感有關鍵作用。分別將港澳地區的公民教育課程改革歷程劃分為5個階段，並從政策背景、主體、願景、內容與實施效果幾個層面進行探討。對比分析港澳公民教育課程改革，發現回歸前兩地均實行非政治公民教育；回歸前後兩地均開展公民政治教育；2002年後香港公民教育名實相悖，而澳門地區持續深化愛國主義教育。最後，發掘港澳公民教育存異的原因與課程領導權、學校落實、教師及教材相關。 Copyright © 2022 廣東省茂名市社會科學界聯合會.

In the face of the rising tension between Hong Kong and mainland China, Hong Kong's Chief Executive Carrie Lam blamed the city's education system for its inability to develop a sense of 'I am Chinese' national identity and vowed to step up 'national education' from preschool. This article explores how 188 young preschool teachers perceived their national identity and viewed the applicability of national education in Hong Kong preschools. Data were collected using both quantitative and qualitative measures. The findings showed that even though the participants strongly resisted their Chinese identity, they agreed that national education could be introduced in preschools if it would be rendered rational and apolitical. Nevertheless, they suspected that the administration's motive behind national education was political indoctrination. They also noted several pedagogical difficulties. Finally, the implications are discussed against the changing socio-political context, serving as lessons for local and international readers. Copyright © 2022 Routledge.