Search

There has been increasing discussion among educators and researchers about harnessing the idea of gamification to enhance the current learning and teaching practices in school education. Leveraging the context-aware mobile technology and student-centred learning theories, we have developed a mobile application, Gamified Authentic Mobile Enquiry in Society (GAMES), to support students in conducting authentic outdoor enquiry-based learning in social humanities education. This paper reports the quasiexperimental study in which we evaluated the learning effectiveness of GAMES in terms of supporting students' knowledge construction, in comparison with the conventional outdoor enquiry-based learning approach. It involved a total of 559 Grade-10 students from top, middle, and bottom academic-banding schools. Results indicated that, compared to the conventional approach, GAMES had different degrees of positive effects on the high, moderate, and low academic-achieving participants. This study not only provides grounds for a wider adoption of GAMES in social humanities education, but also makes a contribution to empirical evidence in the field by designing, implementing and evaluating gamified mobile learning in authentic outdoor contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article considers Chinese calligraphy as an expression of aestheticism and spirituality that allows the artist to explore the self and Chinese culture and how important it is to teach calligraphy to students. The author feels that instruction in calligraphy would provide a multicultural education to Chinese students and help them to develop as people. Calligraphy as a vehicle for the author's personal narrative and storytelling is considered and the author relates his own education in calligraphy. When discussing the spiritual aspects of calligraphy, the author describes the method for making brush strokes and its emotional and physiological impact on his body. The author also discusses the connection between the Tao and calligraphy.

Teachers in Hong Kong, as elsewhere, are concerned with students' misbehaviour. In secondary schools two teams of teachers, a guidance team and a discipline team, deal with it. This article examines how teachers make sense of their caring work and strategies for behaviour management. Taking an interactionist perspective, the framework suggested by Stebbin (1969, 1975) was adopted for exploring how teachers defined the situation in which they participated. Qualitative data were collected using interviews and classroom observation. Sixty teachers were interviewed. Eighteen classrooms were observed. The influence of the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, emerging as a main theme from the data, was prominent, as its key principles were incorporated into the teachers' personal system of caring. The findings illuminate the influence of Chinese culture in Hong Kong schools. Implications are drawn for the promotion of culturally responsive programmes of pastoral care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]