Media

Steps to Paradise and Beyond: Hawaii to China, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong and elsewhere

Speaker:  Dr. Verner Bickley, MBE
Moderator: Dr. Gillian Bickley, Editor and Publisher
Date:  23 January, 2014
Time:  7:15pm – 9:00pm
Venue:  Special Collections, 1/F Main Library
Language:  English
Registration: http://lib.hku.hk/friends/reading_club/bt2014_01.html

About the Speaker
Dr. Verner Bickley, MBE has lived in Asian and Pacific countries for over fifty years, enjoying a long and distinguished career of service in Singapore, Burma, Indonesia, Japan, Hawaii, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong, including influential and path-breaking work on behalf of the British Council, the US federally-funded East-West Center housed at the University of Hawaii, and the then Education Department in Hong Kong. In his work at the East-West Center, in particular, he was at the forefront of a pioneering effort to embrace cross-disciplinary knowledge on the cutting edge of what subsequently became the "Pacific Rim" in academic and wider discourse. In Hong Kong, he was first director of the Institute of Language in Education (now incorporated in the Hong Kong Institute of Education) and contributed much to the understanding of the standard of English in Hong Kong.

About the Book
Steps to Paradise and Beyond, the second volume of Dr Verner Bickley's autobiography, describes some of the fascinating experiences and cross-cultural insights derived from his work and travels in many Asian and Pacific countries, including his official visit to China in November 1979 and his experiences in South Korea just before the assassination of President Park Chung-hee. He writes briefly about President Obama’s mother as an East-West Center grantee during Verner's time as Director of the EWC Culture Learning Institute and the President’s own education in Hawaii. Verner concludes with a brief description of how the Institute of Language in Education (now incorporated into the Hong Kong Institute of Education) was set up (in the early 1980s) by the Hong Kong Government "to raise substantially the professional standards of English and Chinese in the schools" of Hong Kong.

Media Contact:  Mr. Gary Chin (Public Relations & Development Manager), Tel: 2859 2211