Pop Culture Seminars_4@HKIEd

June 10, 2009 Wednesday

Hong Kong Institute of Education

Popular Culture and Education in Hong Kong

Series Seminars 4

1. A Study on Constructive students' learning experience through visual images of Project YiJin Students' Artwork

Purrie Ng, School of Continuing and Professional Education, Hong Kong Institute of Education

Traditional arts education in Hong Kong is largely teacher-centered and product-oriented. Recently, constructivism is one of the main learning approaches in visual arts education in Hong Kong. It is a theory that equates learning with creating meaning from experience. With the education reform implemented in the last decade, many community colleges have been established gradually for providing continuing education for F.5 school leavers. Among them, Project Yi Jin is one of the major groups. This paper will focus on the study of the constructive learning experiences of continuing education students – the case study of Project Yi-Jin students’ artwork through created visual images. The value of the study is twofold. Since limited research has been conducted in this area before, it is worthwhile to explore the values and characteristics of their artwork for future research. In general perspective, it can provide evidence for substantiating the theory of constructivism in visual arts education. I base my findings on Hall’s culture theory focusing on the elements of production, representation, identity in analysis. Through the study the paper will explore how the images are manipulated as a means of visual culture through description, analysis and reflection.

2. Chinese arts: Popular culture

Josephine Do, Hong Kong Institute of Education

Today we’re going to pursue the idea of artists transforming an aspect of popular culture or 'low' art into a work acceptable in the world of high art. We’re also going to look at the effect of Pop art on artistic efforts to break down the distinction between art and popular culture in recent times. We’ll be talking about the China art movement known as Political Pop.

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.

Pop Culture Seminars_2@HKIEd

May 6, 2009 Wednesday
Hong Kong Institute of Education

Popular Culture and Education in Hong Kong
Series Seminars 2

1. Pre-service language teachers in film directors' chairs
Randal Holme, Hong Kong Institute of Education
Alice Chik, City University of Hong Kong

Film, video and drama have a long pedigree in language teaching as tools for listening comprehension and developing listening for speaking and writing activities . Drama-based techniques have also been used formally to mount target language theatre productions or informally to prepare students for the performance aspects of target language use in scenarios, simulations and guided fantasies. This presentation tracks a film-making project conducted by a group of student teachers in a local secondary school. It will look at the student teachers’ attempts to master film and script writing techniques in English whilst trying to impart them to a less than enthusiastic group of secondary school students. Its conclusions will challenge some of the fundamental myths about the ‘Facebook/YouTube’ generation, by suggesting that the project may say as much about the limitations of professional training and project time frames as about the usefulness of film-making projects in language teaching.




2. Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy: The public pedagogy of Asian female singers' English music videos
Phil Benson, Hong Kong Institute of Education

Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy is the title of a song recorded by Thai singer Tata Young and its accompanying music video (MV). Tata Young is one of several Asian female singers who have recently recorded in English. As the title of her song suggests, these artists’ English productions often problematize Asian ethnicities and gender roles through the use of sex-positive lyrics and visual images that are untypical of their Asian-language productions. Viewing engagement with popular music as a kind of identity work, my presentation explores the implications of this new trend through analysis of several thousand YouTube comments on recent English songs by Tata Young, Utada Hikaru, Koda Kumi and Jolin Tsai. It focuses on the ways in which identity work is triggered off by three main questions: (1) Should Asian singers sing in English? (2) Are Asian singers who sing in English ‘really’ Asian? (3) Should Asian female singers be so up-front in their presentations of sexuality? The paper argues that by destabilizing familiar triangulations of language, ethnicity and gender, these singers and their MVs are playing an important role in ‘public pedagogies’ of local, regional and international identity in Asia.

Pop Culture Seminars@HKIEd

May 6, 2009 Wednesday
1. Alice Chik and Randal Homle: Pre-sevice language teachers in film directors' chairs.
2. Phil Benson: Sexy, Naughty, Bitchy: The public pedagogy of Asian female singers' English music videos.

May 20, 2009 Wednesday
1. Aaron Koh: Popular culture goes to school in Hong Kong: Troubling the articulation of the New Senior Secondary Curriculum, Learning English through popular culture
2. Christine Chan: The origins of Chinese food and its transition in the 21st Century.

June 10, 2009 Wednesday
1. Josephine Do: Chinese arts: Popular culture.
2. Purrie Ng: A study on constructive students' learning experience through visual images of Project Yi-Jin students' artwork.

A series of lunchtime seminars showcasing research at HKIEd. Each seminar will include 2x30minutes presentations, plus 30 minutes informal discussion. From May 6 to June 10, we will have 6 presentations on popular culture and education, each with particular focus on movie, music, literacy, Chinese food and arts. If you are interested, feel free to contact us at hkpop@ied.edu.hk at Hong Kong Institute of Education.

Pop Culture Seminars_1@HKIEd

Popular Culture research project started its series seminar yesterday. Professor Nicola Yelland from Early Childhood Education made a presentation on "Critical Issues for learning in the 21st century: Multiliteracies, new technologies and knowledge building".

March 18, 2009 Wednesday Hong Kong Institute of Education

Popular Culture and Education in Hong Kong

Series Seminars

Critical issues for learning in the 21st century: Multiliteracies, new technologies and knowledge buidling

Nicola Yelland, Hong Kong Institute of Education

In this talk, Nicola explored the lifeworlds of Millennial learners. She also suggested that they live multimodal lives that are very different to the lives that they experience in school. She introduced ways in which this impacts on our conceptualisation of literacy and share some of her work with teachers who have broadened their undertandings about literacies for the 21st century, which encourage students to become active participants in the knowledge era.