Using a content analysis method, this study develops a culturally based inventory of play categories from parents and children reports and explores how such types of play varies in environment and time. A total of 171 parent–child dyads from 13 Hong Kong kindergartens participated in the study. Results reveal that play practices reported from Hong Kong parents and children are categorised into four types. Data from parents and children show that a high frequency of symbolic and sociodramatic play is arranged on weekdays, whereas place-specific activity is the most frequently arranged in weekends. The qualitative quotes from parent and children interviews share the consistent view which reflects symbolic and sociodramatic play as the most liked activities. However, findings exhibit the inconsistent view on the most wanted play activities. Implications of these findings and suggestions about parental involvement and play facilitation for children are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Routledge.

Background: Early childhood is a critical period during which patterns of movement behaviors are formed. The World Health Organization had endorsed guidelines for physical activity, sedentary behavior and sleep over a 24-h time period, which had been adopted by the Center for Health Protection of Hong Kong. This paper reports on stakeholder engagements that were conducted to inform the design of strategies to disseminate the guidelines in early childhood education (ECE) settings. Methods: Using a mixed-methods study design, we sought to (a) assess the stakeholders' levels of awareness and knowledge of the Hong Kong movement guidelines for young children and (b) identify the factors that influence the uptake of the said guidelines. We conducted an online survey of early childhood education teachers (N =314), twelve focus groups involving teachers (N = 18) and parents (N = 18), and individual interviews of key informants (N = 7) and domestic workers who provide care for preschool-aged children (N = 7). Descriptive statistics were used for the quantitative data, and thematic analysis was performed on the qualitative data using an inductive and semantic approach following a realist framework. Findings: Our findings show that teachers were aware of the movement guidelines for young children, but their knowledge of the specific guidelines was deficient; parents and domestic workers had limited awareness and knowledge of the guidelines. Uptake of the movement guidelines is enabled by parent engagement, activities in the ECE centers, home-school cooperation, and community activities for children. The challenges include the time poverty of parents, local curriculum requirements, limited physical spaces, social values, and pandemic-related restrictions. Conclusion: We recommend that dissemination strategies in the ECE context should deliver knowledge content and support stakeholders in mitigating the challenges associated with time, space, and social conditions. Copyright © 2022

This study examined the direct and indirect relationships of children's overexcitabilities with their playfulness and creative potential in the kindergarten context. Participants were parents and teachers of 140 Hong Kong Chinese kindergarten children (47.9% girls, mean age = 52.2 months). Parents reported their children's overexcitabilities (imaginational, psychomotor, sensual, intellectual, and emotional), and teachers rated children's playfulness (physical spontaneity, social spontaneity, cognitive spontaneity, manifest joy, and sense of humor) and creative potential (creative personality traits) as demonstrated in the classrooms. Hierarchical regression revealed that controlling for child age, gender, and parental education, children's social and cognitive spontaneity were significant correlates of their creative potential as perceived by the teachers. Moreover, results from the path analytic model showed that the positive relationship between intellectual overexcitability and creative potential was fully mediated by cognitive spontaneity. In contrast, the indirect relationship through social spontaneity was non-significant. The findings suggest that children's daily imaginative and inventive peer play in kindergarten may be conducive to their creative potential. Practically, results underscore the utility of creating a preschool play environment that embraces children's choice, autonomy, and originality while promoting peer interaction and collaboration, as such an approach may cultivate their creative potential. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

The growing concerns regarding the risks of transmitting the COVID-19 virus have intensified the job-related stressors commonly encountered by teachers in various cultural contexts. Evidence shows how the COVID-19 crisis has negatively impacted teachers' mental health outcomes such as stress, depression, and quality of life, which highlights the significance of designing psychological programs to boost teachers' well-being. This study examined the effects of a well-being intervention based on the Positivity, Relationship, Outcomes, Strength, Purpose, Engagement, and Resilience (PROSPER) framework on well-being outcomes among 76 in-service teachers (Mage = 26.05 years, SD = 4.71, range = 20–45; female = 93.4%) in Hong Kong. Participants completed survey measures associated with the seven PROSPER outcomes at baseline and 2-month follow-up. Multivariate regression analysis indicated that there were statistically significant multivariate effects for intervention conditions, Wilks' Lambda F(7, 58) = 4.50, p =.01. Results demonstrated that teachers who were assigned to the intervention condition (n = 36) had significantly higher scores than those in the control condition (n = 40) on positivity (b = 0.41, 95% CI [0.16, 0.65], p =.01), strength (b = 0.62, 95% CI [0.23, 1.01], p =.01), purpose (b = 0.61, 95% CI [0.18, 1.04], p =.01), and resilience (b = 0.57, 95% CI [0.07, 1.07], p =.04). Our findings provide evidence on the mental health benefits of the PROSPER-based psychological intervention program for preschool teachers. Copyright © 2022 Society for the Study of School Psychology. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The aim of this study is to investigate the reasons for academic stress in Hong Kong and provide recommendations to the government on ways to alleviate this problem. Using photovoice, 15 undergraduate students from a private community college in Hong Kong were invited to take and discuss photographs regarding their lived experiences of learning. Thematic analysis is applied to generate themes from the photovoice data. The results suggest several possible reasons for academic stress, including examination demands, school administration and parents. However, the underlying social reason for academic stress may be the internal contradictions of the education system. That is, the education system purports to value all-round and whole-person education but subordinates this worthy goal to examination results. Thus, the results of the study suggest that the government should address this internal contradiction by considering educational, economic and cultural factors when planning educational policies and/or changes. Copyright © 2020 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

This article illustrates the social construction of teachers’ emotions by drawing on the emergent sociological perspective of inhabited institutionalism to report on a qualitative research project on teachers’ emotions in Hong Kong. A thematic analysis was performed on the transcripts of interviews conducted in 2012 with 21 teachers at Hong Kong secondary schools and on the policy documents and newspaper articles from the education reform era of 1980 to 2011. Three major themes emerged from the data: (1) the institutional logic of whole-person education, (2) the institutional logic of accountability, and (3) an asymmetry between these institutional logics, which is causing a displacement of the meaning of education and thus has emotional consequences for teachers. Taken together, these themes show that managerialist education reforms bring the institutional logic of accountability into the institutional environment of education, which results in the recoupling of school administration and teachers’ work. This recoupling leads to the decline of teachers’ work autonomy. The institutional logic of accountability tends to inhibit the institutional logic of whole-person education and to replace the instructional meaning of education with managerial meanings. In the institutional context, teachers are forced to do a lot of work that they interpret as meaningless, but they find that they are powerless to change the situation. They may therefore choose to inhabit the institutional logic of accountability and the tightly coupled institutional context of school organizations. Consequently, teachers may become unhappy at work during and after managerialist education reforms. According to these findings, teachers’ emotions can be regarded as an interactional–institutional construction. That is, teachers’ emotions may be socially constructed through the negotiation of meaning under the institutional logics that guide their actions and the interactions that uphold the institutional

In recent years, many teachers suffered different kinds of negative emotions in the context of education reforms. A typical explanation was that the education reforms disempowered teachers in teaching, so teachers were forced to do much non-instructional work. Teachers considered their work meaningless but were powerless to change it, and eventually indulged themselves in negative emotions. However, the present research suggested that this explanation had neglected teacher agency and might be incomplete. Arguing from the perspective of social constructionism, the research showed that teachers in Hong Kong experienced negative emotions in education reforms because, on top of the disempowerment, the reforms structurally displaced teachers’ educational goals with administrative goals. The goal displacement impeded teachers’ evaluation of the instructional values of their work. Thus, teachers perceived their work as inconsistent with their major purpose of teaching (i.e. making a difference) and they felt negative towards work. Copyright © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

 Since the mid 1990s, teacher burnout has become a crucial phenomenon in the Hong Kong education system, as increasing numbers of Hong Kong teachers have been reported as stressed, exhausted, and depersonalized in their teaching. In the Hong Kong community, including the academic circle, many people have applied the psychological theory of burnout to study the psychological causes of teacher burnout. However, this article argues that teacher burnout has become a social issue and is not a purely psychological phenomenon. Thus, it is important for us to identify the structural causes rather than the psychological causes of teacher burnout, to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of teacher burnout, and to develop better solutions. This article therefore theoretically analyzes how teacher burnout can be caused by certain structural forces, including structural education reforms, the administrative structure of schools, and the occupational and career structure of teaching, from the perspective of the sociological theory of work alienation. The article also gives recommendations for further studies based on the theoretical analysis. Copyright © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

The study explores the social psychological process of teachers’ emotional experiences. Twenty-one secondary schoolteachers in Hong Kong were interviewed. The findings show that the teachers generally felt caam² (a Cantonese adjective that covers a range of meanings like gloomy, dreadful, tragic, pitiful, pathetic, and miserable) in teaching. The social psychological process of the emotional experience of caam² involves how teachers interpret the significance of their actual work in attaining the teaching goal of making a difference. If they interpret their work as incapable of fulfilling the goal, they will experience negative emotions in teaching. The findings also suggest that the interpretation is affected by teachers’ power which is unequally distributed according to teachers’ teaching experience and managerial roles. Copyright © 2016 Tsang and Kwong.

Background: Recently, studies have found that more and more teachers in Hong Kong express negative feelings toward their work, such as feelings of dissatisfaction, exhaustion, meaningless and powerless. These negative emotional experiences may affect both their well-being and the quality of their teaching. In order to have a better understanding of this phenomenon, researchers employ the sociological concept of emotion management. Therefore, this paper reviews different sociological perspectives on the phenomenon in order to give recommendations for educational reforms and policies and for further research on teachers' emotional experiences at work in Hong Kong. Aims or focus of discussion: This article considers two major sociological approaches to understanding emotion management in teaching: Conflict theory and symbolic interactionism. At the end of the discussion, implications for educational reforms and policies and recommendations for further research are suggested respectively. Arguments/comments/suggestions: The article argues that symbolic interactionism is a more appropriate approach to understanding emotion management of teaching than conflict theory because it considers the effects of both structural conditions and teachers' agency on teachers' emotions. Thus, it may provide a more comprehensive and realistic account and framework for our investigation. Conclusion: The article suggests that we should study teachers' emotional experiences at work in Hong Kong from a symbolic interactionist perspective of emotion management of teaching. Accordingly, we should try to answer the following questions: What are teachers' expectations about their work? What are the conditions of their work? Are there gaps between their expectations and reality? What are the constraints that affect the realization of their expectations? What emotions do they actually experience at work? In order to answer these questions more effectively, this article recommends adopting in-depth