Playing with English: Creative Writing in Hong Kong Secondary School Classrooms

As Hong Kong educators and parents know, English is a core subject for everyone beginning in Primary One, and it's no longer official policy to rank schools in “bands.” But there’s a wide gap between the kinds of English instruction offered at legacy “Band One” schools on the one hand, and historically less elite schools on the other. Since 2016, I have worked with several local institutions, including the Hong Kong Education Bureau and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, to build programs that bring creative and fun encounters with English language and literature to students (and their teachers) across a range of assessed English fluency levels. In this talk, I’ll discuss how “playing with English” can be a powerful tool to help students at every level become more confident, enthusiastic speakers and writers.

Collier Nogues is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of two poetry collections, and her creative and scholarly work has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. She has taught many community poetry workshops for adults and for school-age students in Hong Kong and abroad, and has recently collaborated with HKU’s Common Core to research how student writers perceive originality, creativity, and authorship when co-creating with Generative AI. Her favorite thing to do is write outdoors.