A narrative inquiry into values about teaching and learning in higher education in Hong Kong : teachers' perspectives

Abstract

This study inquires narratively into university teachers’ values about teaching and learning, with a specific focus on how their values about teaching and learning shape and are shaped by their experiences. Adopting narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Clandinin, 2013) as the research methodology, stories were compiled as a means to explore values about teaching and learning from individual university teachers’ perspectives. The inquiry process began with living stories through non-participant classroom observations, followed by stories emerging from personal conversations. Drawing on the experiences of three participant university teachers in Hong Kong, the study reveals the multiplicity and complexity within their experiences of values development and especially the interplay between their conceptions and practice of values about teaching and learning. Three narrative accounts, which together formed the findings of this study, were co-composed as the teachers were prompted by me to review experiences of values about teaching and learning through constantly attending to the three-dimensions of “temporality”, “sociality” and “place” in a narrative inquiry space (Clandinin, 2013, p.39). Three resonant threads (Clandinin, 2013) were used to elucidate both the diversities of each participant’s experiences and the links by which their lives were woven together. Such resonant threads were identified as: learning from past experiences; bumping with institutional, cultural and social narratives; living out values through curricular actions. The discussion of the identified resonant threads contributes to the construction of a theorized mapping of narrative understanding of teachers’ values about teaching and learning in higher education in Hong Kong, from which conceptualization of the process of how teachers live out their values was attained for an updated version of constructive alignment model with a matrix of curricular actions for living out values. It was found that teachers’ values about teaching and learning can be summarized as encompassing of knowledge values, public service values, attitudinal values and pedagogical values. Past experiences are taken as instruments of understanding or reference for construction of teachers’ values. The bumping points between stories have greatly stimulated individual teachers’ sense of agency to construct, consolidate and live out their values while revealing the value conflicts they experienced as their stories collided with other stories shaped by broader institutional, cultural, social and system level structures. By taking curricular actions in content, tasks and delivery, teachers can integrate values into curriculum and form a learning context, from which their values about teaching and learning were put into practice. This study contributes practically to the approaches concerning how teachers can create opportunities to include values consciously in teaching with a matrix of curricular actions for living out values. Understanding how teachers’ values shape and are shaped by their experiences carries theoretical and social significance to improve the quality of higher education and prepare universities to act as communities in meeting contemporary challenges that are not only ecological and technological, but also educational and moral.