Life & Values Education:
The Power of Togetherness
Dr Raymond Kong
Dr Raymond Kong specialises in Life and Values Education, its curricula and teaching strategies. He has brought change and synergy to the education landscape during his time at the Centre for Religious and Spirituality Education before joining the Department. As former Centre Manager, Dr Kong worked with over a hundred local schools and regularly hosted platforms to showcase commendable teaching practices. Notably, he started the Convergence: The Award for Outstanding Life Education Teaching Plan (點滴成河 — 傑出生命教育教案設計獎) to celebrate outstanding efforts in integrating values education into subject lesson plans. The award scheme was widely supported, receiving hundreds of entries.
Together with a vast network of educators, Dr Kong influences local education at various levels. At the policy level, he reviewed and evaluated the implementation of life-planning education in Hong Kong schools (PI: Prof Lee Chi Kin John), making recommendations to the EDB which in turn drove the Final Report by the Task Force on Review of School Curriculum and the new Primary Education Curriculum Guide. Dr Kong still leads life-planning training organised by CLAP@JC today. At a school level, Dr Kong supports school-sponsoring bodies, like Tung Wah Group of Hospitals and Caritas Hong Kong, as school consultant, advisor, or manager. He oversees the development and implementation of Life and Values Education curricula in alignment with the school ethos. In addition, Dr Kong also works with local organisations such as the Hong Kong Primary Education Research Association and Big Education Platform, and the local press; at press conferences, he engages different practitioners in dialogue, shares their expertise and disseminates exemplars, leveraging these findings to inform future policies.
Dr Kong’s work does not stay within Hong Kong. He seeks to enhance student-teachers’ learning experiences abroad, for example, through school projects in the Greater Bay Area (Co-PI: Zhao Zhenzhou). Earlier this year, he led a tour for primary and secondary schools to Taiwan to expose in-service teachers to the Life Education programmes there. For the past decade, Dr Kong has also collaborated with the Chinese Society for the Study of TaoXingzhi and the British Educational Research Association, attending and presenting at conferences as well as discussing potential research opportunities with scholars around the world.
October 2023