Background: Hong Kong is currently a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. It has autonomy over many policy areas, including finance and education. It is a community of seven million people, which has changed its focus and identity significantly over the last 25 years, from predominantly manufacturing to a service and knowledge economy with particular strengths in financial services.
Purpose: This paper will consider the market for teacher education places and the market for teachers, and explore the career intention and commitment implications of high numbers of well qualified applicants applying for teaching in the context of reduced work opportunities elsewhere, an increasing higher education focus on intake scores and the challenge, for the teaching profession and the education system, of teaching becoming less secure work. Sources of evidence: Governmental and institutional publications and data, along with research and survey findings, together with comparative literature underpin the reactions to past, present and possible future effects on teacher education in Hong Kong.
Main argument: Given its financial focus, Hong Kong would be expected to suffer significantly during the recent financial crisis and that this would impact across all its sectors including Education and Teacher Education. In addition to the financial crisis, other changes have affected teacher education in Hong Kong, including major reforms in curriculum and school and higher education structure and a significantly diminished birth rate reducing posts in teaching, and raising concerns about job security.
Conclusions: Hong Kong is a very prudently managed economy with substantial reserves and a commitment to "small government" and the impact has been different from many other systems. Places on teacher education programmes remained unchanged. Applications for teacher education programmes however increased significantly during the crisis.
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Changing educational priorities are reflected both in the literature and the models that seek to describe initial teachers' professional formation and learning. However, do new teachers' experiences conform to these models? A sampling of Hong Kong secondary school teachers over their first year as full-time teachers provides data from questionnaires and longitudinal interviews supporting a variety of processes and related models which highlight that becoming a teacher reflects individual differences. To account for this array of individual differences an interaction model is proposed that reflects the Chinese cultural context of this study - the 'dim-sum' model - a model that sites initial teachers' professional formation and learning within a multi-perspective and interactive learning context.
[Copyright of Teacher Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530500200252 ]