In the context of the educational reforms that began at the turn of the century, Hong Kong's New Senior Secondary (NSS) English language curriculum was launched in 2009. An important aim of the curriculum reforms is to make teaching and learning more relevant to students' everyday lives through more studentcentred approaches to pedagogy. In the context of English language teaching and learning, the reforms also involve an emphasis on 'cultural enrichment' and 'personal involvement', in addition to 'language enrichment'. The main feature that supports these aims is an innovative emphasis on language arts and the introduction of four language arts electives, including one entitled Learning English through Popular Culture . Based on analysis of curriculum documents and resources and student surveys conducted before and after the first round of implementation of the 3-year curriculum, this chapter discusses the role that popular culture now plays in senior secondary English language teaching (ELT). While arguing that the inclusion of popular culture in the NSS English curriculum is largely a positive move, it identifies significant unresolved issues in the implementation of the curriculum, which may limit the degree to which it succeeds in achieving its goals of cultural enrichment and making English language teaching more relevant to students' lives.
[Copyright © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.]

In 2007, the Hong Kong government announced that tertiary institutions receiving central funding would be required to incorporate outcomes-based learning in their curricula. The policy was presented as part of a raft of measures to introduce creativity and innovation into the traditional approaches to teaching and learning, that have been described as producing “a somewhat sterile curriculum that emphasized propositional knowledge and avoided awkward questions”(Adamson & Li, 2004, p.59). The Hong Kong government wishes the education system to be in line with what it perceives to be state-of-the-art practices internationally. However, the history and culture of Hong Kong has endowed the local system with its own distinctive characteristics that, as previous efforts to graft foreign curricular initiatives on to the Hong Kong education system have shown, need to be taken into account. The move to require institutions to incorporate outcomes-based was greeted by concerns that the outcomes-based approach was too "Western" (i.e. progressive) for educational values systems prevalent in Hong Kong and, at best, institutions would only pay lip-service to the reform. (Interestingly, a contrasting concern was that outcomes-based learning—which is already falling out of favour in Australia, where it originated, and in other Western systems--would actually have the opposite effect to the intended goal of rejuvenating the curriculum, as it would tend to reinforce rigidity in curriculum design, reducing student choice and flexibility to design their own learning pathways.) At the heart of the matter is the issue of effective international knowledge transfer. This paper reviews Hong Kong’s very mixed experiences of international knowledge transfer in education, and proposes a pragmatic framework for curriculum design that takes into account and negotiates political, social and pedagogical forces at the local and international level. It illustrates how this pragmatic approach to curriculum

This study is designed on the basis on the key premises of Activity Theory, in the development of curriculum leadership among a group of primary teachers in two innovation engaged schools in Hong Kong China in April 2005 and 2007. Three curriculum development teams were formed and their membership and leadership were manipulated to create internal tensions and contradictions among members in a flattened leadership context. The aim is to investigate the extent that teacher participation in curriculum decision making processes is mediated by the artifacts such as hierarchical power, roles and leadership styles. The findings based on the analysis of the interviews as well as the video taped meetings of the Mathematics and Chinese curriculum teams point to the varying mediation effects of the two artifacts, namely the roles of the consultants and the leadership styles upon teacher participation. On the effects of the roles of the consultants, two types of professionality were asserting different influences on the mediation processes. The restricted professionality focused on closed discourse between participants and the leadership style was power coercive. The extended professionality however, generated an open discourse with evidence of multi-structural interaction pattern. The nature of the former is didactic while the latter is more negotiable among members. On leadership styles, the personality of the subject head and its degree of domination was having effects on the discourse styles and participation nature, though the distributed leadership was in function in the curriculum development teams. Assertive subject head constrained the interaction pattern of the meetings while the less assertive one opened opportunities for exploration and experimentation by the members of the teams. In conclusion, various artifacts assert their influences in the mediational processes of the interaction among members of the curriculum teams and these mediational effects have either constrained

This study aims at investigating the effectiveness of the establishment of the school based curriculum development teams as a response to the challenges of the school performance and student learning. A theoretical framework is derived from the various assumptions about school leadership, patterns of dissemination and teacher development. This framework will then be used to evaluate the extent that school based curriculum development teams contribute to teacher development and school improvement. The findings will shed light on the necessary conditions for successful implementation of school based curriculum development in a policy context of decentralizing curriculum decision making. Two case schools from two different socio-cultural milieu, Hong Kong and the Netherlands, are chosen for comparison. A mixed method approach of investigation is adopted and methods include interviews of teachers and students, analysis of video taped meetings and questionnaires.

In Hong Kong, curriculum is centrally developed and teachers are expected to implement it as designed. With few teachers and educators involved during the developmental process and limited efforts to disseminate the curriculum initiatives, teachers are often left to implement the curriculum with little understanding of the rationale of these changes. Successful implementation is, therefore, left with individual teachers. Based on experience and research in areas of (a) curriculum development, (b) implementation of innovation, (c) teacher thinking and teaching, and (d) professional development of teachers, this paper argues for the importance of looking at implementation issues from the eyes of practitioners in schools. Research findings suggesting that teachers’ conceptualization of teaching and the way they carry out their professional duties are influenced by their personal theories and school culture will further be presented. With knowledge and understanding of the social realities of teachers, strategies for effective implementation of educational innovation will be proposed.

The paper reports the findings of a study of student-teachers' perceptions of the Target-Oriented Curriculum (TOC) in Hong Kong. It attempts to clarify the present pictures created by the impacts caused by the introduction of the TOC initiative and its consequences. Focusing on the perceptions of student-teachers studying the final year of the two-year full-time Certificate of Education (Primary) Course at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd), a prominent teacher education institution in Hong Kong, the paper examines some issues in relation to the implementation of TOC. The writer administrated a written questionnaire which contained a number of attitude statements regarding the context, concept and practice of the TOC initiative. The student-teachers were invited to indicate the extent to which they agreed with the statement and the responses to the questionnaire were analysed. The writer also conducted a semi-structured group interview in which a number of open-ended questions, based on the content concerning the written questionnaire, were presented for discussion in depth among some key informants. In this paper, the writer regards the student-teachers as 'newly trained teachers' since data of the study was collected from the sample population at a critical time, at the end of the course and just before they became 'serving teachers'. The study is not on a large scale and the data collected represents respondents' views at particular point of time. These views may be strengthened or modified after some time. However, the writer recommends that further study, focusing on newly trained teacher's change of perceptions of the TOC, is worthwhile to engage in. To conclude, the quality of school education is an issue of major concern. The Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd), should always be committed to work for the improvement of the education system. Having provided adequate places for teacher education, it is necessary to raise the standard of it and