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Foreword |
Waves of
education reform in recent years have brought along numerous issues:
shrinking numbers of classes, the shutdown of schools, resource cutting,
benchmark exams for teachers, language degrees, and school-based
management policy, etc. All these are suffocating frontline educators as
they are not only required to spend time on daily teaching but also have
to deal with the challenges of these reforms. The quality of teaching and
learning is, in consequence, inevitably affected.
Despite the Curriculum Development Council putting forward in its Learning
to Learn: The Way Forward in Curriculum Development in 2001 that
school-based curriculum development would be the main theme of curriculum
reform, teachers can hardly squeeze enough time to design school-based
curriculum resources with the quantity of teaching and non-teaching duties
they are expected to perform. What makes the mission even more difficult
is that pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes generally
lack formal training in how to prepare teaching materials. In response to
this situation, the Journal of Quality School Education (JQSE) is
dedicated to introducing educational knowledge and to promoting sharing of
experience and ideas among education practitioners.
The focus of the current issue is education reform. It contains both
theoretical and practical articles, including contributions from frontline
educators. We also have two invited reports from the Curriculum
Development Council which explain the matter from a curriculum designerˇ¦s
perspective. The reports are intended to inspire the development of
school-based curriculum and to stimulate sharing of related experience in
the future.
On behalf of the Hong Kong Primary Education Research Association and the
Centre for Research and International Collaboration of the Hong Kong
Institute of Education, I would like to express my sincere gratitude and
appreciation to the editorial board members and to all contributors. Your
work has made JQSE a more fruitful and meaningful journal. I would like to
take this opportunity to thank frontline teachers and schools for their
support, as more than 20% of schools in Hong Kong have already subscribed
to JQSE. Without the undivided support from school practitioners, it would
not have been successful. As an objective academic journal without any
political symbolism, JQSE will continue to publish more local articles on
professional practices for frontline colleaguesˇ¦ reference. I would also
like to call for collaborative effort in promoting more fruitful
discourses in the local education field, which is also the fundamental aim
of JQSE.