Practice-expectation gap and the pedagogical decision making of teachers in pre-primary sector in Hong Kong

Practice-expectation gap and the pedagogical decision making of teachers in pre-primary sector in Hong Kong

• Fung, Kit Ho Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction, Chinese University of Hong Kong

2008

• F Learning & Teaching
  • FA General Teaching Strategies, Different Instructional Methods
• D Curriculum
  • DC Pre-Primary Education Programmes

Early Childhood Education Curriculum Development

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Pre-Primary Education

The call for professionalism in kindergarten education has been an important educational issue over the past several decades in Hong Kong. Official expectations have been published to guide the services of kindergarten education and to supervise teachers' pedagogical practice. Kindergarten education services that are child centred and play based, and that practise integrated learning to nourish children's holistic and balanced development are advocated. However, Quality Assurance Inspection reports have shown that kindergarten teaching and learning is still teacher directed. Young children are passive recipients of knowledge. The services run counter to the progressive motives of the 2000 Education Reform in nurturing young children to be active and self-motivated life-long learners. Driven by the interest to study the practice-expectation gap, the present study sought to observe kindergarten teachers' classroom practice, investigate their pedagogical decision making, and reveal the complexities underpinning their pedagogical roles which, to an extent, emerged from the practice-expectation gap.
The present study, framed by in a qualitative research design, employed on-site observations and teacher interviews, together with official document analysis and training curriculum document analysis. The wealth of data and information collected revealed that a practice-expectation gap does exist.
The data analysis suggests that the teacher informants' pedagogical decision making and practice were shaped by a number of intervening forces. These forces can be categorised into (a) the personal variables of the teacher informants in terms of their personal beliefs and values towards kindergarten education, (b) the contextual variables of school management structure and administrative arrangements within which the teacher informants delivered their teaching and fostered the children's learning, (c) the societal variables of parental expectations of the kindergarten education of their young children, and (d) the professional variables of the teacher training programmes and their training effectiveness that nurtured the teacher informants' pedagogical competence. Each of these variables represents a unique array of interferences for the teacher informants, and when drawn together, the combination of influences that thus emerges illustrates the complexities within which the teacher informants made their pedagogical decisions. Consequently, the pedagogical practices of teachers were pushed and pulled by these intervening forces, causing deviation from the Official Expectations.
Based upon the findings of the study, improvement measures are suggested, namely, government subsidies to help the kindergartens to mediate market forces, restructuring of the bureaucratic-authoritarian management in kindergartens, promotion of home-school partnerships, empowerment of teachers through nurturing their pedagogical competence, and reformation of the philosophical underpinnings of teacher training.

PhD

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-08, Section: A, page: 3023

• English

Dissertation Theses

• 9780549771296

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/001e2b9b

2010-12-16