A study of the personal and professional identities of secondary school teachers in Hong Kong

• Main Author: Choi, Kai-yan
• Published: University of Nottingham 2012
• Subjects: 371.10095125
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.582081

In response to the absence of any comprehensive research into teacher attitudes in the educational reform era in Hong Kong, this study explores how the personal and professional identities of Hong Kong secondary school teachers were formulated in the context of government promoted education reforms that began in 2000. Survey data on the reform policy objectives and certain specified measures were collected through a self-administered questionnaire that was distributed to a random sample of secondary teachers. Responses were received from 308 teachers, a response rate of 35 per cent in individual teacher terms. In addition, 15 narrative interviews were conducted with secondary teachers from a variety of backgrounds. A uni-variate and bi-variate analysis of the quantitative data was performed using SPSS for Windows, while Labov's approach to narrative analysis (Riessman 1993,2002; Gibbs 2007) was applied to the qualitative data. It was found that many secondary teachers were not satisfied with the pre-reform era of school education. Whilst these teachers possessed divergent views on a number of newly introduced measures, many of them were suspicious of the effectiveness ofthese new measures in tackling the problems of the pre-reform era. The survey responses also indicated that teachers strongly perceive that their work is not understood well by other stakeholders.