curriculum reforms initiated by the Hong Kong Curriculum Development Council in
2000, entitled ‘Life-long Learning and Whole-person Development’. The curriculum
framework created spaces for school-based action research and the Hong Kong government
established five projects to help teachers develop strategies for implementing
different aspects of the framework. One of these was to explore the potential of
‘variation theory’ to help teachers deal with increasing pupil diversity in their classrooms
as an outcome of the reforms (see Lo, Pong, and Packey 2005). This phenomenographic
theory of learning was developed through a series of ‘design
experiments’ in Swedish schools by Marton and Booth (1997) and their co-workers.
In 1998, under the leadership of Marton, then working in Hong Kong as a visiting
scholar, Lo Mun Ling participated in a study that used ‘variation theory’ as an
explanatory framework to account for why some teachers are more effective than
others in bringing learning about for their students. The theory focuses on the object
of learning and is interested in students’ ways of experiencing and understanding it.
The study found that the theory helped to explain why some teaching acts did or did
not help students to learn effectively, and that this was related to the kinds of patterns
of variation which teachers enacted in their classrooms to relate their students
to the object of learning (see Lo 2012, Preface). As a result Lo and colleagues created
a model of action research based on the Japanese Lesson Study method (see
Lewis, Perry, and Friedkin 2009, 142–154) to help teachers to collaboratively
explore the pedagogical potential of ‘variation theory’ for designing their lessons
and developing their teaching. They called this theory-informed model of action
research Learning Study (Lo 2012, 9–39) and embarked on a series of such projects,
the first of which, on pupil diversity, was briefly depicted above. Through these teacher-
based action research projects, ‘variation theory’ was further articulated, refined
and developed in Hong Kong (see Lo and Marton 2012, 7–22) – for example: