Bringing Class (back) in Curriculum Reform: The Case of Hong Kong (original) (raw)

Abstract

Despite its viability having been challenged, social class has remained the central analytical tool in understanding social inequalities, particularly in education. (Johnston 2007; Lareau 2008; Wright 2008) The question of how curricular and pedagogical reform in school is interrelated to the larger structure of the class and power relations has been relatively under-researched. The global trend of curriculum development and pedagogical strategies has been contested between academic rigor of knowledge (“traditional”) versus experiential, constructivist learning and skills acquisition (“progressive”). In Hong Kong, under the new senior secondary academic structure that remains based on traditional educational vision to a large extent, the new core subject Liberal Studies entails considerable elements of progressive education, characterized by cross-curricular framework and issue-enquiry approach. The particular pedagogic challenge of this subject is to enable students to make connections and manage ambiguities from subject to subject, and between school and everyday life knowledge. With the insights from Basil Bernstein’s theory and the sociology of knowledge, this paper attempts to explore how these reform-minded practices in classrooms amplify, maintain, or attenuate relative advantages and disadvantages among students from different class backgrounds. Are middle class students able to retain their relative advantages in this new subject and likewise, would the reform efforts foster or hinder the working-class students’ prospects for educational achievement?

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