Teachers' Identities and Life Choices

This book discusses issues related to teachers’ identities and life choices when globalisation and localisation are enmeshed. It examines how competing cultural traditions and contexts acted as resources or/and constraints in framing teachers’ identities and their negotiations in the family and the work domains according to their gender positioning, their roles in the family such as husband, wife, father, mother, brother, sister, son and daughter and roles in the school such as principal, senior teacher or regular teacher. Contrary to an essentialist approach to identity and culture, teachers’ stories show that their identities and life choices were hardly free choices; but were often part and parcel of the culture and contexts in which they were embedded.Teachers’ identities are found to be fluid, complex, hybrid and multifaceted. Using Hong Kong as a case study, this book provides not only traces of the continuity and changes of Confucian self and cardinal relationships but also a glimpse of how educational reform as neo-capitalist discourses in the workplace interacts with Confucian cultural traditions creating new hybrid practices (problems or possibilities or both) in the school and in the daily lives of teachers.

LUK-FONG Yuk Yee Pattie holds a BA (Geography) and a MEd (Curriculum) from the University of Hong Kong, a MAEd (Counselling) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a PhD degree (Education) from the University of Canberra, Australia. She is currently an adjunct associate professor of the Department of Special Education and Counselling at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). For over three decades she has been a teacher educator: first in the teaching of geography, then in school guidance and counselling. She has worked respectively as a secondary school teacher, Teaching Consultant of the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong, and Senior Lecturer and Principal Lecturer at the Grantham, the Sir Robert Black and the Northcote Colleges of Education in Hong Kong. She joined the HKIEd in 1994 and worked there as associate professor until her retirement in 2011. Her primary research foci are: guidance and counselling, self and personal identities, gender identities in teachers, and family changes. She developed and taught undergraduate and post-graduate courses on guidance and counselling, the Self and Personal Development module for Liberal Studies, and School-Based Family Counselling. She has published in over 25 international academic journals and over 15 book chapters, including “Competing Contexts for Developing Personal and Social Education in Hong Kong”(Comparative Education, 2001) and “Towards a Hybrid Conceptualization of Chinese Women Primary School Teachers’ Changing Feminities – A Case Study of Hong Kong” (Gender and Education, 2011). She co-edited with Dr Lee Man Yuk Ching the book, ‘School Guidance: Trends and Practices” (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). Dr Luk-Fong is a founding member of the HKIEd’s Gender Matters Group, and the Consortium of Institutes on Family in the Asian region (CIFA). She was also the recipient of the Award for Outstanding Contribution to School-Based Family Counselling (Oxford Symposium in School-Based Family Counselling) in 2011.