Pop Culture Seminars_3@HKIEd

May 20, 2009 Wednesday
Hong Kong Institute of Education

Popular Culture and Education in Hong Kong
Series Seminars 3

1. Popular Culture goes to school in Hong Kong: Troubling the articulation of the New Senior Secondary Curriculum, Learning English through Popular Culture
Aaron Koh, Hong Kong Institute of Education


Come August 2009, schools in Hong Kong will be rolling out a new Language Arts Elective called “Learning English Through Popular Culture” to be offered to the Senior Form. This new Popular Culture elective in the Hong Kong New Senior Secondary Curriculum is of analytic interest as it is the first schooling system, at least in Asia, to take up Popular Culture seriously and integrated it as “curriculum-as-knowledge” in its official curriculum. While the relationship between Popular Culture and its relevance for schooling and classroom pedagogies has been explored in educational research, in the last decade or so, research conducted in this field has offered up a somewhat tentative and predictable finding often expressed as “pedagogical implications on literacy education and curriculum development” and, as isolated case studies. Yet the Hong Kong education system has taken up what appears to be a bold move to re-design its English Language Curriculum to include popular culture – a curriculum that ostensibly takes into consideration students’ interests to promote the learning of English. Promising as this new curriculum might be, there are however inherent pedagogical trouble spots in the spelled out curriculum. This paper critically examines and unpacks the articulation of the pedagogical what and how of the new elective. Although the “curriculum-in-use” remains to be seen, I argue in this paper that the pedagogical investments as defined in the curriculum is reduced to “reading” and “writing” text types, where students are likely to be locked into a procedural way of “thinking” and “doing” popular cultural texts. I then suggest some ways forward that might deliver what is otherwise a promising and innovative curriculum.

2. The origins of Chinese food and its transition in the 21st Century
Christine Chan, Hong Kong Institute of Education

The paper addresses a contemporary anthropological issue for medicine on the popular Chinese food culture in combating the world epidemic of childhood obesity in the 21st century in Hong Kong. The origins of Chinese food stems from Taoism which is a religious-philosophical tradition that has, along with Confucianism, shaped Chinese life for more than 2,000 years. The Tao regulates natural processes and nourishes balance in the Universe. It embodies the harmony of opposites. The Yin and Yan are symbolized as the two opposing forces in the nature of the Universe. And it is believed that humans intervene in nature and control the balance of Yin and Yang. Eating proper foods is one way of helping a person maintain such balance and can also return him to a state of balance that is the origins of Chinese food as medicine. However, political, social, economic changes of this popular food culture with the demands of globalisation in most of the modern Asian societies continue to reshape food architectural tradition. Traditional Chinese food has survived the changes but is continually under challenge and, to an extensive degree, particularly in newly urban places, requires socio-cultural reconstruction. The understanding of this popular food culture has huge impact on health education for the new generations in Hong Kong and China as a whole.