Educational reforms have created tremendous stress for teachers in many parts of the world. This paper discusses the inadequacies of policy-makers treating teachers as having 'deficits' that require 'fixes', rather than addressing bigger system issues that cause their stress. Drawing from the case of a Hong Kong professional teacher development course, this paper argues for the use of 'personal growth' as the main concept for professional development of teachers in the midst of educational reforms. The course addressed the changing roles and identities of teachers amid educational reforms and societal changes, and enhanced teachers' competence in dealing with increasingly diverse student populations. Quantitative and qualitative post-programme data showed that participants gained competence in self-understanding, caring for students as unique individuals, thinking within a systems framework and building a learning community. Implications for teacher education are discussed.
[Copyright of Professional Development in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19415250903017341]

In a time of mass schooling in most parts of the world, the discourse of the owoman primary teachero is often the subject of discourse. Yet most stories of these women teachers emerge from other (Western) contexts, with little known about how changing education processes affect the gendered identities of women in other cultural settings. This paper explores how women teachers negotiate their gendered identities in Hong Kong, where modernization has already mingled with the indigenous Chinese culture. It provides the stories of four Chinese women teachers as they engage in ongoing construction and negotiations of gendered identities over their life histories in Hong Kong. All are ethnically Chinese, of different ages and at different stages of their personal and professional lives, and all have grown up in Hong Kong. A framework of post-colonial concepts of hybridity and border crossing helps to suggest how identity resources develop in relation to a range of contemporary practices which are experienced as both pressures and opportunities. These Chinese women teachers' identities are seen to be complex, fluid and multi-faceted, continually under construction in their daily lives, with changes experienced in both work and family settings.
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In this paper, I posit a hybrid conceptualisation of women teachers' identities in the globalising and localising negotiation of gender. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridities, this paper argues for a fluid, hybrid and multifaceted reality of women teachers' lives in the areas of family, the husband and wife relationship, and the place of the child in the family as they engage in workplaces. The analysis draws on in-depth interviews with 20 Chinese women primary school teachers first individually and then in groups of four or five in Hong Kong where globalisation meets with the indigenous Chinese culture. Implications for teacher education are discussed.
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Unlike many other places in the world, guidance lessons in Hong Kong are taught mainly by class teachers rather than school counsellors. Given the unique educational context of Hong Kong as East meets West and given that guidance is essentially a concept from the West, it is important to investigate what kind of pedagogy is suitable for teaching guidance in Hong Kong. This paper examines what teaching guidance lessons are like in Hong Kong for the researcher and for some primary teachers. A qualitative case study methodology is used. Data are drawn from the author's own experience in a primary school teaching attachment and interviews with guidance professionals, primary school principals, teachers and students in three selected primary schools in Hong Kong. Pedagogical issues for the teaching guidance curriculum are explored and discussed. The researcher argues for a hybrid guidance pedagogy for the teaching of classroom guidance in Hong Kong. Findings are applicable to countries facing similar issues in parallel mixed cultural settings.
[Copyright of Counselling Psychology Quarterly is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515070500295904]