Exploration of secondary teachers' conception of extra-curricular activities

Exploration of secondary teachers' conception of extra-curricular activities

• Chow, Chiu Woo

2006

• M Teachers & Education for Teachers
  • MG Identities, Attitudes & Opinion of Educational Workers
• M Teachers & Education for Teachers
  • MA Professional Education for Teachers
• D Curriculum
  • DK Co-curricula Activities, Extra-curriculum

Educational Sociology Teacher Education Secondary Education Curricula Teaching

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Secondary Education

For data collection, the researcher was attached to three Hong Kong secondary schools with average academic and extra-curricular activity performances for three months each during the past two years. Having got familiarized with the teachers and students through joining various formal and informal school activities, in the last month of his attachment, the researcher invited each teacher to be interviewed on the topic of extra-curricular activities and to be tape-recorded. In the end, 122 teachers agreed to be the participants in the interviews. The interview was conducted in a semi-structured way, in which the teacher first recounted and commented on his/her experience and impression of extra-curricular activities. The researcher then asked for clarifications and further exploration of his/her own conception, with the help of some "situation cards". In the whole interview process, the researcher adopted a "non judgmental" attitude towards the definition of "extra-curricular activities", only asking the interviewee questions on the clarity and consistency of his/her conception. Each interview lasted for about an hour. After the interviews, the recordings were converted into written scripts. Based on the interview process and scripts, the researcher sorted out various main themes and key words and proceeded with data analysis. After three stages of back-and-forth collation and with the number of cases reduced to forty, finally seven conceptions of extra-curricular activities have been constructed: Accountability, Attachment, Mould, Experience, Personal growth, Liberation, and Balance. The researcher has depicted the specific horizon, concepts and the relationship among concepts, and also compared and contrasted the distinctive features of each conception.
There are multifarious extra-curricular activities in Hong Kong secondary schools. Nearly every teacher participates in the activities. Different teachers infuse extra-curricular activities with diverse meanings, and actualize different modes of school education. This study aims at exploring Hong Kong secondary school teachers' conceptions of extra-curricular activities. It collates individual cases into different collective clusters, depicting each conception of extra-curricular activities, and the relationship between the concepts. This thesis attempts to relate and contrast the features of the seven conceptions of extra-curricular activities and the four main questions generated from the theories about valuation in curriculum, thus showing that the conceptions of Accountability, Attachment and Mould are based on "group" values, which set an instrumental field for "learning". Conceptions of Personal growth, Experience and Liberation refer to "individual", tending to adopt "individual as a unit" and "intrinsic values" as the learning field. The conception Balance is in-between the two. It tries to balance the tension between individual and social instruments, as well as intrinsic and extrinsic values. Taking a step further, this thesis also argues that to improve the quality of school education, each teacher has to decide on a definition and orientation of the curriculum which is in line with his/her own extra-curricular activity conception. Merely claiming that "Extra-curricular activity is part of the curriculum" is not necessarily conducive to improving education quality. Finally, the findings also point to the need to explore how we can provide teachers with a cultivating environment and quality facilitators for helping them clarify, improve and transform their conceptions of extra-curricular activities in the course of learning. This will be a key concern for the further development of teacher education.

PhD

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4078

• English

Dissertation Theses

• 9780542963728

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/en/bibs/499a71d7

2010-12-16