The deficit representation of youth at different levels of curriculum-making: a case study on the Liberal Studies curriculum in Hong Kong

Chitat Chan, Wai-Fong Ting

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articlepeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

This study explores whether the deficit approach to understanding youth, which has been widely critiqued in contemporary youth studies, could still be a dominant paradigm in an emerging curriculum which emphasises multiple-perspective thinking. The analysis compares the representations of youth in selected reference sources at different levels of curriculum-making of the Liberal Studies (LS) curriculum in Hong Kong. These includes: (1) the official website of the curriculum, (2) the textbooks and (3) the teachers' verbal accounts. The findings indicate that the curriculum contents at the institutional level (the LS official website) do not really favour a deficit representation of youth, but that the contents at the programme level and at the classroom level do intensify that deficit representation. The findings shed light on the discourse of youth in education regimes and inform future research.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)529-544
Number of pages16
JournalDiscourse
Volume33
Issue number4
Early online date15 Jun 2012
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Oct 2012

User-Defined Keywords

  • representations of youth
  • representations of adolescents
  • critical thinking
  • multiple-perspective thinking
  • Liberal Studies

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