Professional growth of Hong Kong teachers in the context of the implementation of the new senior secondary liberal studies curriculum

Abstract

Inspired by the theoretical framework of three human knowledge interests suggested by Habermas (1972) and Grundy’s (1987) application on understanding teachers’ professional growth, this study examines four Hong Kong secondary Liberal Studies teachers’ experiences and generates important understandings about the professional growth of Hong Kong teachers in the context of the implementation of the New Senior Secondary (NSS) Liberal Studies (LS) curriculum. The main research question is—How do the teachers’ perception change in their practice when implementing the NSS LS curriculum in their schools? This main question subsumes the two research sub-questions: (a) To what extent can the teachers’ changes be related to the three types of human knowledge interests? (b) Which aspects in the teachers’ experiences can be taken as critical for the transformation of their awareness?

This is a four-year longitudinal qualitative research study and an exploratory multiple case study approach is employed, with data collection mainly by (i) teachers’ in-depth interviews, class observation and post-observation teacher interviews. And case study is often taken as an important means to situate the professional development of teachers in realistic contexts. The activities and experiences of each teacher were studied chronologically for within-case analysis, whilst the activities and experiences found in the cases of different teachers are compared and contrasted in cross-case analysis. The two analyses together help refine the conceptualization of the professional growth of the teachers.

The researcher finds that the teachers struggled with different degrees of tension, anxiety and frustration caused by the gap between their educational ideals and the reality of their own students’ learning. From the detailed cross-case analysis with regard to four kinds of relation existing in the teachers’ experience, including (i) Teacher—curriculum relation, (ii) Teacher—student relation, (iii) Teacher—colleague relation and (iv) Teacher—teacher-self relation, themes are identified to portray the teachers’ professional growth over these years.

On the theoretical side, the study helps throw light on how teacher growth can be understood during curriculum reform process, particularly when teachers of content-based subjects need to step outside their comfort zone and take a teaching role of a cross-disciplinary and multiple-perspective nature. In this study, the researcher regards the four teachers as each having had their own emancipatory thoughts exhibited in an ‘expanded space’ with new perspectives, which enabled them to be open to more possibilities and alternative actions and hopes. Through such emancipation, the broadened thinking would enable one to interpret happenings with more perspectives, which one might have thought to be impossible or difficult to accept before. The research study also revealed that the teachers’ better understanding of their own beliefs and their relation to their actions, feelings and emotions through emancipation, as suggested in Habermas’s theory of three human knowledge interests, would be one of the essentials for the LS teachers to gain for professional growth.