In world music ensembles such as African and African Caribbean percussion ensembles, the Gamelan ensemble, and the Latin marimba ensemble, members may sing a song, play instruments, and dance simultaneously. This practice is known as music multitasking. For musicians in Western art music traditions, music multitasking can be a challenge. This…

Classroom instruction in China and in the United States have sharp differences. Typically, constructivist learning theory shapes American classroom instruction whereas Confucian educational culture shapes Chinese classroom instruction. Furthermore, typically, Chinese classrooms adopt a direct instructional approach whereas American classrooms…

Hong Kong has been actively promoting a student-centered approach to teaching since the 1980s. Despite this effort, students in Hong Kong still tend to be traditional learners who rarely experience and gain from real student-centered learning. While teachers hold a "quantitative" concept of learning and focus on transmitting declarative…

Before 1997, no formal curriculum on Chinese cultural education for primary schools was developed in Hong Kong although the education authority had started to introduce some items of Chinese cultural learning into the Chinese language syllabus when the Target Oriented Curriculum was implemented in 1996. However, such items were incorporated into…

Primary school learners' first encounters with mathematics in a traditional learning environment often create lifelong "math phobia."(Papert 1980) The situation in a country emerging from an oppressive education system designed to educationally disempower the majority of the population is much worse. The typical scenario in a previously…