Past Seminars

Many of the processes by which educational phenomena are experienced and by which the products of the learning process are enacted are essentially social. In this presentation, we report the key findings from three complementary projects:

• the optimisation of student learning when engaged in individual, pair and collaborative group work (The Social Unit of Learning Project),
• the role of teacher selective attention in facilitating teacher professional learning (The Learning from Lessons Project) and
• the identification and promotion of the professional language by which teachers in Australia and eight other countries interact with and reflect upon the events of the mathematics classroom (The International Lexicon Project).

We discuss the ways in which “the social” can shape and even constitute the learning of students and teachers, and the implications of the project findings for the optimal functioning of the classroom as a site for student and teacher learning.

Airports are organized as ‘text types’ or genres in terms of four defining moments or stages: approach, departures, airside and arrivals. In each of these stages, we witness how ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ are both static and dynamic, permanent and transient, and how they are also dialectically constituted through the deployment of various discourses, genres and styles, including multiple languages alongside images, interactions, bodies and artefacts. This paper examines how two regional airports (Seattle-Tacoma and Cardiff) use mono- and multi-lingual displays in staging their focal and peripheral spaces and how they ‘put themselves on the map’ by positioning themselves – and their passengers – as being  simultaneously connected to the global (i.e. gateways to the world) and to the local (i.e. thresholds to ‘home’). As agents of difference and markers of distinction, airports are purveyors of both national/regional pride and global capital.

This seminar introduces some of the major theoretical contributions in the study of public policy processes in the field of public administration and policy studies. Among the theories that will be discussed include bureaucratic politics, policy streams and other agenda setting models, and implementation studies. A brief survey of recent literature on public policy and governance in Hong Kong, especially arguments about policy coordination, legitimacy, and institutional compatibility, will also be made. This seminar aims to explore whether such research in public policy will have any useful implications for the conduct of research on education in general and education policy in particular.

Culture can be conceptualized as a reservoir of resources and ways of thinking, acting, interacting and meaning-making. Children of migrated families tend to treasure their own ethnic cultures and traditions as well as learn and adapt to their host country’s cultures and traditions. Here language and cross cultural understanding (Ward and Kennedy, 1993; Kubota R., 2004; Wiggins B E., 2012; Gandana & Parr, 2013; Garcia, A C., 2014) play a critical role and a bridge between the immigrated communities and host communities. This study aims to explore the cross cultural understanding among the South Asian diasporic students who have grown up in Hong Kong and are studying in Hong Kong tertiary institutions.

At present, more than half of the mainstream primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong have admitted students from local ethnic minority communities, among which the four major ethnic groups are Pakistani (33.95%), Filipino (20.24%), Nepali (16.79%) and Indian (16.55%) (Education Bureau 2013). This talk will begin with a brief introduction to the social and historical background of the South and Southeast Asian communities in Hong Kong. The speaker will then discuss the linguistic background of the ethnic minority students in local schools. It is hoped that an understanding of the social and linguistic background of these students would aid policy makers and educators in planning school.