Chen Yangbin

The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Exchange to the University of Sydney, Australia

I am Yangbin CHEN, a PhD student at the Faculty of Education. My supervisor is Professor Gerard. A. Postglione. Besides my current PhD research on Chinese ethnic minority education, I fortunately received a research grant called an Endeavor Australia Cheung Kong Award in 2005. It sponsored me to carry out a half-year research project entitled “Chinese background students’ attitudes towards Chinese: a sociological case study in an Australian secondary school”, which was overseen by Dr Huizhong Shen at the China Education Center in The University of Sydney.

Personally, I credit my successful application of the award to three main reasons. The first was paying attention to the graduate Newsletter as it always conveys many valuable academic opportunities. The Endeavor Australia Cheung Kong Award is one of them. Second was to decide on a suitable research topic that may be of interest to the sponsors. Since the award aims to promote the mutual understanding and development between Australian and Asian countries, I then developed my proposal to concern both parties: Chinese immigrant children in Australia and their cultural connection with home countries in Asia. The last point is to seek your supervisor’s support for your application, which means that your application would preferably be related to your current degree research at HKU. In my case, both my PhD research in HKU and the project in Australia were consistent under the broad understanding of multiculturalism education in a global context.

Regarding my experience of doing educational research atThe University of Sydney, what impressed me the most was the official ethics application before undertaking research in the field of study. The ethical concerns in all research involving human participants have become increasingly important in all Australian universities and research institutes. Every institute has set up a Human Research Ethic Committee. Before you can commence data collection, you must go through a complex administrative procedure which deals with applying for permission from relevant authorities and obtaining the individual participants’ consent. In extreme cases, the ethics application may take about several months to finish. While it does add tedious workload for researchers, particularly those novice research students, I have to acknowledge that it protects the interests and welfare of individual participants, as well as avoids potential legal and ethical problems for researchers.

Finally, I would express my sincere gratitude to the Endeavour Cheung Kong Awards program. It has provided a valuable opportunity for me as a young social science researcher to immerse myself in an Australian research community. This has greatly enhanced my professional development and future career. Given my personal academic experience, I hope to continually contribute to the work of crossculture understanding between Mainland China, Hong Kong and Australia.

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