Being Open to the Other: K-12 Teachers’ Multimodal Reflections on Hong Kong Curricula

Against the backdrops of decolonization and globalization, Hong Kong education has witnessed intense local-global interactions in the last decades. In this chapter, we use this context to contribute specific insights on how education systems and schools from diverse points on the globe can prepare students to meet the challenges of globalization in the twenty-first century. Specifically, we relate pertinent findings from a study that recruited K-12 in-service teachers from Hong Kong to explore their understandings of how the subject-specific curricular documents outlying what was supposed to happen (i.e., programmatic curriculum) compared to what actually happened in the teachers’ classrooms (i.e., classroom curriculum). Teachers were invited to create multimodal artifacts (e.g., written texts, paintings, videos, dramas, and presentations) that, when analyzed in the study through postcolonial and cosmopolitan lenses, expressed the following findings: programmatic curricula were viewed as heavily influenced by “Western” theories and ideologies; despite being open to the Other, the teachers thought that some of these theories and ideologies could not be implemented in the classroom; in their teaching, teachers confronted themselves and the Other to negotiate their implementation of the curriculum, imagining a syncretic curriculum made up of the strengths of the local and global.