Integrating media education into liberal studies: a positive response to curriculum reform in Hong Kong

Abstract

Media education has been around for quite some time in the West (Bazalgette et al. 1990), but it only started to gain acceptance in Asia (Cheung 2005), particularly in Hong Kong, in the last decade. Recently, it has been gaining more attention in Hong Kong thanks to the curriculum reform in which liberal studies will become one of the four core subjects to be taken by students in the New Senior Secondary Curriculum and media is one of the six themes to be studied in the subject of liberal studies. This article argues for the need for teaching media education in liberal studies and shows the many connections between the two subjects that facilitate this integration.

Keywords:

• curriculum reform
• Hong Kong
• integration
• liberal education
• liberal studies
• media education

Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. HKU 7441/06H). Furthermore, the author wishes to thank his research assistant, Yu Guo.