Environmental education has been widely promoted in Hong Kong schools since the 1990s. Teachers have a crucial role in educating students to be well-informed, environmentally aware and responsible green citizens. The environmental literacy and tendencies of teachers are seen as having far-reaching influences on the development of environmental education in Hong Kong. This paper aims to elucidate teachers' competence in implementing environmental education in schools through their narrative dialogues regarding their engagement in classroom practice and thinking about environmental education. The teachers were selected from a pool of teacher respondents categorised according to their scores for environmental knowledge, attitude and behaviour in a territory-wide survey of Hong Kong primary school teachers. Follow-up interviews with three teachers of varying levels were conducted to explicate their personal stories, focusing on how the teachers' knowledge-attitude-behaviour associations influence their implementation of environmental education in schools. The teachers' experiences and perspectives behind their stories provide crucial, specific baseline information, informing the development of more relevant teacher education programs in environmental education, and subsequently, enhancing environmental education in schools.
[Copyright of International Research in Geographical and Environmental Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10382046.2014.967111]

This study explores the changes in the conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986'0) of student teachers during training. The focus of geographical education in Hong Kong is shifting from imparting knowledge to developing skills of geographical enquiry, requiring geography teachers to rethink their pedagogical content knowledge to reflect this change of emphasis. This poses a particular problem for student teachers with limited understanding of what is involved. In the transition from training to full time teaching, geography student teachers undergo and must undergo changes in their individual understanding about planning and conducting lessons.
The aims of this study were: (I) to explore the pattern and variations of student teachers' conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge for teaching secondary school geography; (2) to identify the factors influencing thinking and changes in conceptions; and (3) to develop a schema to synthesise the development of their geographical pedagogical content knowledge. A qualitative-interpretive research approach, adopting a phenomenographic perspective, was used. The data came from recursive, in-depth interviews with three student teachers conducted at various points during the two years of their training.
The study demonstrated that the conceptions of the student teachers shifted in varying ways and to varying degrees during training, as their pedagogical content knowledge grew. Conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge were viewed in terms of teachers' use of concepts to explain phenomena, their choice of teaching methods in relation to pupils and images of teaching. The three teachers exhibited seven conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge, ranging from the simple transmission of text to the development of structured ideas appropriate to pupil understanding, and the integration of content and method. Their conceptions were influenced by a number of factors, including their own past learning,