Cultural Difference In Education In Australia

54543940 HO Hiu Ki

Knowing the cultural difference, especially in the education aspect, is one of the objectives of immersion programme. In order to have a thorough understanding of the local learning practice, I interviewed a local Australian Ben McConnell, who is my Winter School course classmate. He is 20 years old and studying politics in the university of Adelaide. The high school which Ben studied in was a private school, which was located near his home instead of the city center. The remote location constituted to the small number of students studying in the school, which is only around 200 students in all grades. There are even only 7 students in his history group. Apart from the elective subject of history, he was also required

The most apparent one is the size of teaching classes. As in Hong Kong, 200 students is only the number of students in a grade, there are usually thirty to forty students in an elective class. The class size is comparatively larger than that in Australia, while the teachers are relatively spending less time to teach students separately. The role of teachers in Australia is foster learning, while that in HK, is leading student to learn or just teaching. The position of teachers is rather dominant in terms of the authority and involvement in the lessons. For the design of the study curriculum, it is the same as Australia, which is well-structured beforehand. The flexibility of such plan is even smaller than that compared to Australia. For instance, it is always hard to change their elective subjects or study in subjects that are not offered by its own school. Besides, after students have specialized major electives to study after secondary 3, it will be difficult to change to study in another field in university because the background knowledge is one of the selection criteria. Meanwhile, apart from textbooks, notes will usually be prepared by teachers, which draws a scope of learning for students to follow and study. Since students can study the concepts by themselves and still get good marks, HK students will

They engaged as much as they can in discussing and asking extra questions during the lessons to learn more. Meanwhile, as students in HK emphasized more on result instead, once they find the instant method to get correct answers or a good grade, they will follow and may skip some of the learning processes like the participation in class. Besides, sometimes HK students may be too emphasized on the result and the instant way to success. This may twist the original meaning of learning like people who joined a lot of extra-curricular activities for the bonus mark but not for the own