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Inquiry-based Teaching and Learning is fundamental to modern western Science Education. This thesis argues that improving Science Education within a traditional Chinese educational setting can be realized by introducing Inquirybased Learning as a cross-cultural educational innovation - through the agency of a Science Learning Centre (SLC). The thesis evaluates the impact and uptake of the Inquiry-based approach, as seen through SLC activities that foster the professional development of Science teachers, and that build awareness of the approach at the community level. It also examines the process of establishing a SLC, and regional network, in Macau. The conceptual and substantive factors affecting the cross-cultural transfer of an Inquiry-based Teaching and Learning approach and the development of the SLC are explored through the theoretical lenses of Complexity Theory, Innovation and Change Theory; Social Networking Theory; and a range of Curriculum Development Theories. Central to the thesis is the analysis of three Episodes involving Inquiry-based training programmes facilitated by the SLC, and one Account of the development of the SLC itself: a series of Geoscience Inquiry-based learning workshops in Macau and Hong Kong; an invitational international professional development Training Programme provided in York by the National Science Learning Centre in England; an innovative Master’s in Education degree module which involved learning in an unfamiliar context; and finally, the creation of the Macau Science Learning Centre network as an agency for promoting Science Education in Macau. Furthermore, the thesis analyzes the multi-dimensional roles of the writer as participant, co-teacher, co-facilitator, researcher, ethnographer, theorist, and SLC manager. It incorporates aspects of educational innovation and change, teacher professional training, and the development of collaborative social networks. The research makes a unique contribution to the field of Science Education, especially in terms of the transfer and adaptability of an Inquiry-based approach into a traditionally Chinese educational setting through the agency of a SLC
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We live in an era in which critique of the West has become a deep-rooted phenomenon of the lives of non-Europeans. This paper contributes to the study of European women perception of South East Asia as mirrored in travel writing accounts and, independently but syncronic, of the Chinese women poets who wrote during a period a few decades before and after the mid nineteenth century. I shall be analysing the Western concept of femininity and domesticity in relation to and symultaneously attempting to reformulate Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism. Central to my research method is the fact that I am trying to add to to a traditional Western-oriented gender issues approach - baded on a review of the mid- nineteenth women travel writers - a reversed view, that being the representation of the Orient emerging from the vision of Chinese women literature. My research not only focuses on the literariness of travel writing, which has been widely neglected, but also on a vision of the Orient that is represented by some Chinese women writers in the nineteenth century –Gan Lirou 甘立媃 (1743-1819) and Lü Bicheng 呂碧城 (1883 – 1943). My research is not a survey study of Chinese literature, and it does not claim to be exhaustive. Instead, I attempt to systematize the problem of Western representations of the Orient by taking Ana d’Almeida’s diary, A Lady’s Visit to Manilla and Japan, as central reference and source of conceptual classification. From there, I am trying to further some gender issues drawn from Ana d'Almeida's text and identify symetric instances of those representations, if present, in Chinese literary texts written roughly in the same historical period. Expending Edward Said’s Orientalism, this paper tries to challenge the classic univocal Orient-Occident approach and to mirror Western Orientalist and pseudo- Orientalist ideas into contemporary Chinese writings. This is also meant to be an introduction to this cross-cultural comparative approach of feminity and domesticity open for further contributions in gender studies as well as in fields bordering social history, history of literature, literary theory and cultural anthropology
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