Teachers’ Interpretations of the Ethical Dimensions of Teaching on the Chinese Mainland: A Case Study of Two Secondary Schools in Shanghai

This paper highlights Chinese teachers’ ethical concerns in their relationships with students, colleagues, and students’ parents. Through a qualitative study of 26 teachers, it was found that the teachers were often trapped in a dilemma between teaching to students’ real development and teaching to the test. The ethics of professional collaboration were compromised by the dominant norms, including interpersonal harmony and respect for older teachers, and by competition among individual teachers to demonstrate good performance. Moreover, in a situation where parents’ trust was diminishing, teachers assumed certain teaching and caring responsibilities for children from disadvantaged families. It is suggested that the professionalization of teachers should provide them with more professional space to transform their ethical considerations into practice.     

The junior secondary history curricula in Hong Kong and Shanghai: a comparative study

Since 1997, Hong Kong's reintegration with China has been founded on the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, which serves to guarantee the sustainability of the capitalist system in Hong Kong under the rule of the socialist motherland. This paper is an intra‐cultural and inter‐regional comparative study of the curricula of two systems (socialist and capitalist) under one country, using the junior secondary History curricula in Shanghai and Hong Kong as a case study. In addition to tracing the differences and similarities, divergences and convergences in the junior secondary History curricula of the two systems, the paper also generates proposals for the future improvement of History education in both cities.     

Educational Usage of Mobile Devices: Differences Between Postgraduate and Undergraduate Students

The rapid increase of smartphone usage in recent years has provided students the opportunity to participate in mobile learning (m-learning) anywhere, anytime. Academic institutions are also following this trend to launch many m-learning services. This article investigates the differences of the user needs between undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) students though an online survey with 140 Library Information Systems (LIS) subjects in a Japanese university in order to provide solid foundations for future m-learning studies. We find that UG and PG students do not show significant differences in adopting m-learning by smartphones despite the fact that they have different learning patterns. The m-learning frequencies of smartphones generally range from weekly to monthly, where using search engines is the most frequent, and reading academic resources is the least frequent. They tend to use these services for handling their daily routines (such as search engine, social networks) rather than their academic activities (such as using online databases to search for academic materials). Further, the results also show that content displaying issues (e.g., small display screen, text unable to enlarge) are barriers for most subjects in using these m-learning services.     

论民族地区人口与经济发展问题

我国民族地区的人口增长状况与这些地区的经济发展有着紧密联系，合理调节民族地区的人口分布、控制民族地区的人口增长，会极大地推动本地区经济的快速稳定增长。     

Directions for the future of schooling in Hong Kong: Vision and reality in a post-colonial society

The study reported here used the OECD scenarios on the future of schooling to probe the views of a sample of educators identified as having the potential to influence education policy formation in Hong Kong. The results indicated that among this sample, there were multiple perspectives on the future of schooling and these were related to the very public education reform agenda that was currently being implemented in Hong Kong schools. The future of schooling was seen to be dependent on the role of the political process in articulating a clear vision, school leadership and teacher capacity. Lack of any one of these was seen as an impediment to achieving change in Hong Kong schools.     

An experience of cultural transposition of the El’konin-Davydov curriculum

Educational Studies in Mathematics - We will present cultural transposition as a particular perspective to frame the use of foreign mathematics education practices as an opportunity for questioning...