Purpose This research is an interview-based study that captures the academics’ perspectives toward the planning and design of an interdisciplinary General Education Curriculum for undergraduate students in the Chinese context, using the Common Core Curriculum at the University of Hong Kong as a case study. Design/Approach/Methods A total of 28 academics with various academic ranking, disciplinary context, proven teaching excellence, and research productivities were individually for and consented to a semi-structured and face-to-face interview. Findings This article suggests four fundamental and interrelated dimensions for consideration when structuring an interdisciplinary General Education Curriculum, namely (1) how to design, (2) what is worth learning, (3) how to learn and teach, and (4) how to know students have learned. It is suggested that the ideal curriculum should remain coherent and coordinated, broad and balanced, as well as open and flexible, with the capture of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, under the facilitation of active, authentic, and contextualized pedagogies and assessments. Originality/Value This article has the potential of informing policymakers and educators around the world to better structure an interdisciplinary General Education Curriculum by creating an overall springboard for future discussion. They can also integrate these evidence-based elements and strategies into their everyday practices.
Since the introduction of the learning-to-learn reform in 2000, Hong Kong policy-makers indicated that they would engage extensively and continuously in policy borrowing based on other high-performing jurisdictions worldwide. An illustrative example is the introduction of the 3 + 3 + 4 New Academic Structure since 2009. However, one of the areas that remain unexplored is the introduction of a broadening General Education among all eight publicly funded universities in the additional year of the four-year undergraduate education. Through narrative review on the basis of Ochs and Phillips’s theoretical model of policy borrowing in education, this article aims to offer an overview of the introduction of General Education among these universities and how it has been undergoing the four respective stages of (1) cross-national attraction; (2) decision; (3) implementation; and (4) internalisation or indigenisation. This will touch upon evaluating the key features being borrowed, adapted, and implemented, reviewing the relevant processes and outcomes, as well as highlighting the issues and challenges that have been and will be experienced. All these evidence-based perspectives can allow practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to better understand the complex policy borrowing process of General Education as a global educational initiative.
The sudden and unprecedented outbreak of the global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought along a series of abrupt and sweeping disruptions on almost all learning systems around the world. The pandemic has simultaneously revealed many weaknesses and problems associated with the existing educational model, which serves as a timely reminder that educators should start thinking and doing education in a very different manner. Nonetheless, this does not simply means restoring the long-standing norms, or reorganising and perpetuating existing practices as “back to normal”, but discarding and transforming many obsolete assumptions and conventional operations as “new normal”. As one of the high-performing learning systems around the world throughout the decades, Hong Kong has successfully transitioned from disruptive schooling to “new normal” throughout the pandemic. With the collection of the series of rich experiences and concrete examples emerging and evolving across different layers of Hong Kong’s learning system, this conceptual article aims to shed light on ten key principles in terms of shaping a more responsive, resilient, and sustainable curriculum system for all students to survive or even thrive in the uncertain and unpredictable environment ahead of them.
With qualitative document analysis, this research focuses on Hong Kong's intended General Education Curriculum (GEC) across the eight publicly funded universities in Hong Kong, in relation to the macro and meso context by departing from the dimensions of (1) rationale; (2) aims and objectives; as well as (3) content. Their GEC can generally be viewed as transmitting a body of structured pure knowledge under academic rationalism, offering fluency and training of useful skills and dispositions under social efficiency, facilitating self-actualization through personalized process of inquiry under child-centeredness, as well as analyzing society and constructing changes under social reconstructionism.
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