Popular Culture goes to school in Hong Kong: a Language Arts curriculum on revolutionary road?

Abstract

English teaching and learning has taken an interesting shift in Hong Kong schools with the implementation of the New Senior Secondary (NSS) curriculum under the ‘334’ education reform. Situating the paper within the broader considerations of the intersection of Cultural Studies and English teaching, this paper examines the challenges and prospects of teaching the new Language Arts elective called Learning English through Popular Culture module. It is argued that while the module endeavours to connect and motivate Hong Kong students to learn English through popular culture materials, the official curriculum and schemes of work, however, narrowly articulate the teaching of popular culture texts conceived as ‘text-types’. Such a formulaic approach to using popular culture in the classroom is limiting and locks students into a procedural way of ‘thinking’ and ‘doing’ popular cultural texts. The paper concludes by offering some ways forward that might deliver what is otherwise a revolutionary and innovative curriculum. Beyond the specific case of Hong Kong, the curriculum challenge discussed is instructive for other education systems and curriculum scholars looking to develop new pedagogies from the intersecting disciplines of Cultural Studies and English teaching.