Understanding Educational Change in Hong Kong: Voicing Policy

The Academic year 2012-13 will mark a significant shift in the ways in which secondary and tertiary education are structured in Hong Kong. Years of planning and preparation will be tried and tested as policy changes see secondary schooling contract by one academic year alongside an expansion of university undergraduate degree programmes from 3 to 4 years. A key goal of these changes is the move away from the ostensibly British (English) 3 year undergraduate model - increasingly viewed as constituting a 'restricted' curriculum - to a 'broader' 4 year liberal arts model as adopted in the US as well as mainland China. The changes therefore represent a significant realignment of perspectives, orientations, and educational values and traditions within the Hong Kong education system. The research is part of a larger ethnographic study that seeks to chart the implementation and enactment of these policy changes in order to understand the variety of ways those involved take up and respond to them. Of particular interest is how this new policy comes to be realised in the already established communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) and figured worlds (Holland et al 2001) of schools and universities across Hong Kong. Drawing from interviews with teachers and students, as well as other forms of qualitative data, this paper seeks to provide an emic account of the ways in which institutions and individuals within them absorb and respond to the imposed policy changes (Ball 1997). A central goal of this paper is to provide localised narratives of the enactment of these policy changes in order to hear, from those most affected, the ways in which individuals and institutions respond to changes of this scale and what this can tell us about how policy is realised in and through practice.