Congratulations to Drs. Hayes Tang and Timothy Yuen (Department of Education Policy and Leadership) and Dr Eric Chong (Department of Social Sciences) on their latest cross-faculty publication "Learning to understand a nation: Developing a national education curriculum imbued with Catholic social ethics for Hong Kong’s primary schools". Published in Social Transformations in Chinese Societies (abstracted and indexed in American Sociological Association Publishing Options database and Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals), the scholarly paper demonstrates the way in which cross-faculty academic collaboration is paramount in addressing timely and significant issues in education and society.
For more information, please see the abstract below and this link:
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). Though the project arose after the failure of the government to force through its controversial national education program, this paper found that instead of being an alternative curriculum with resistance flavor, the project was basically a self-perfection program for the Catholic. It was to fill a shortfall observed of Catholic schools, namely, not doing enough to let students examine social and national issues with Catholic social ethics, which, indeed, had a good interface with many cherished universal values. In the final analysis, the project is not a typical national education program, which teaches students to belong to a nation but an innovative alternative curriculum transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions as advanced by western literature (for example, Gramsci, 1971; Freire, 1970; and Apple, 1993). Using an empirical example of Asian schooling and society, analysis of this paper illustrates the way in which development of an alternative curriculum is more innovative and interesting, transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions.