Are we witnessing the rise of 'global' student protests, in the wake of austerity policies and globalised educational reforms? To answer this question, this article draws on a comparison of the claims, anger, and hope present in three post-2008 student movements: the student movement in Santiago, Chile (2011-2012), the 'Maple Spring' in Montreal,…

Whilst Hong Kong's return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 has influenced education in various ways, major reforms perceived as promoting mainland control have been resisted. For two decades, Hong Kong's educational autonomy under the 'one country, two systems' formula was thus largely maintained. This changed radically with the response to the…

Art education in Hong Kong has undergone various changes in response to educational reform. In art assessment, a major change in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary (NSS) Curriculum is the inclusion of art criticism as a compulsory component of the new public examination. Assessing students' abilities to interpret art in an art criticism public…

This article reports the findings of a five-year longitudinal study investigating the introduction of Liberal Studies in the context of Hong Kong's new senior secondary educational reforms. The aim of this empirical research, which adopted diachronic analysis to allow comparisons over time, was to compare teachers' and students' perceptions of the…

As a worldwide movement, some forms or stages of inclusive education have been experimented and/or mandated in various countries since the mid-1970s. Integration was piloted in Hong Kong in 1997 and remains the official rhetoric and policy. Three developmental phases of inclusive education, namely, integration, integration in transition to…

This article investigates the perceptions of English headteachers and Hong Kong principals on the kinds of pressures that they believed affected the way they did their job, and in particular the degree to which they felt their governments were affecting their leadership role. The research utilised semi-structured interviews to generate written…

There has been a widespread belief that teachers in Asian contexts including Japan and China are well protected by a tradition that reveres teachers. However, in Chinese contexts, cultural traditions have been found to undermine the teaching profession, together with educational reforms and societal changes. This paper reports on an inquiry that…

Not long after the political transition in 1997, Hong Kong witnessed a spate of top-down education reforms that had been conceived within the neoliberal ideology of economic globalisation. Neoliberalism is particularly pervasive here, because of the underdevelopment of representative politics and of critical, social democratic discourse in…

Purpose: This paper sets out in the wider context of globalization to examine how and what specific reform strategies the Government of the Hong Kong special administrative region (HKSAR) has adopted in reforming its higher education system to enhance the competitiveness of its higher education in the increasingly globalizing economic context.…