Teacher agency plays a vital role in professional learning. The revealing practice indicates its fluidity in the process of collaboration. Research suggests that learning through interaction happens by engaging teachers. However, the role of teacher agency remains unclear at a systemic level. This article reports a yearlong ethnographic study of overlapping members from two teams collaborating on contemporary liberal arts curriculum across two different education systems in a Hong Kong secondary school. Discourse analysis of collaborative meetings demonstrated that the overlapping members performed various functions in the two settings. The connections and disconnections suggested that teacher agency was conditional based on the ecological boundary. By identifying their patterns of practice, individual teachers collectively demonstrated different capacities in the two settings within and over time. The findings imply that collaboration is an embedded activity and strongly influenced by the school environment. Overall, this study contributes to a reconceptualisation of professional learning. Copyright © 2021 Routledge.

This paper analyzes global education policy and curricular documents in Singapore and Hong Kong. Using a discursive approach, we characterize curricular aims through various cosmopolitan perspectives. We posit that although touted as Asian global cities, Singapore and Hong Kong are cases where neoliberal and nation-centric educational agendas have effectively rebranded cosmopolitanism and tamed its transformative potential. To develop this argument, we review theories and critiques of cosmopolitan forms of global citizenship education deemed necessary to prepare young people for complex global social conditions. We discuss cosmopolitan principles on identity, values, and deliberation and draw on critical cosmopolitanism and Asian forms of cosmopolitanism to provide a discursive framework for analyzing curricular intentions in the two cases. Copyright ©Routledge.

This study examines language features that students are likely to encounter in chemistry textbooks in EMI classrooms. In consultation with teachers, the presentation of science knowledge was examined in three chemistry textbooks commonly used in Hong Kong secondary English Medium Instruction (EMI) classrooms. Student textbooks were collected from eight Grade 10-12 chemistry classrooms. Adopting a functional linguistic approach (e.g., Veel's (1997) framework of text taxonomy), analyses showed that explanation is the most common text type in the three chemistry textbooks, and the five subtypes of explanations represented in the textbooks are causal (40%), factorial (24%), sequential (15%), consequential (13%) and theoretical (8%). The distribution of these different types of explanation texts and their features were examined to reveal the kind of language that students in EMI classrooms are likely to encounter when learning chemistry. The results show that explanation texts served as a primary linguistic reservoir for EMI students to learn the language of science. The analysis of the language features of these texts could be used to inform future pedagogies aiming at making these textbooks more accessible to students learning in English and facilitating both their science learning and control of scientific English.
[Copyright of Journal of English for Academic Purposes is the property of Elsevier Ltd.]

Teacher professional development (TPD) is regarded as crucial to fostering teacher improvement. Recent calls for the internationalization of teacher education and professional development, including teachers undertaking courses taught abroad, have enhanced the scope of TPD opportunities. Yet, little is currently known about how such international experiences of TPD shape the perspectives of these teachers. It is also unclear how the learning these teachers experience in foreign settings is reflected in their engagement in the practices and activities of schools and classrooms upon returning to their home country. Therefore, this paper reports the results of a study that explores the perspectives and experiences of one group of in-service mainland Chinese teachers who undertook professional development in Hong Kong. Grounded in a theory of teacher identity construction and using in-depth interviews, results suggest that the teacher’s identities were shaped by the learning they experienced during professional development. However, following their return to teaching positions in mainland China, relations of power within their schools blocked the construction of their preferred teacher identities in practice. Suggestions are made for supporting the identity construction aims of teachers who undertake international professional development and implications for future research are considered. Copyright © 2020 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study that examined the perspectives of one group of teacher educators and pre-service teachers about a teaching internship in Hong Kong. Reflecting recent interest in both a practice turn in pre-service teacher education as well as teacher identity construction, the study uses in-depth interviews to reveal how both teacher educators and pre-service teachers construct the meaning of a teaching internship. The results suggest that two discourses dominate such meanings: the discourse of integration and the discourse of separation. The study not only reveals the presence of these discourses but, moreover, considers how their interplay provides affordances for and constraints upon the capacity of pre-service teachers to construct their professional identities during the teaching internship. This exploration suggests that this interplay can lead to identity conflict for pre-service teachers. Implications for overcoming such conflict in ways that support the construction of pre-service teachers' professional identities are considered and suggestions for future comparative research discussed. Copyright © 2018 Teacher Development.

This article unpacks how neoliberal discourse functions as a dominant but problematic system of reasoning that changes and shifts the ways in which we come to think about early childhood education and care. A post-structuralist lens is deployed to understand the production of fears and hopes under the looming shadows of contemporary education reforms and social policies. Highlighting Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea as three cases from East Asian cultures, this article seeks to elucidate how a similar neoliberal economic and political imaginary is at work to (re)construct East Asian children as human capital for the alchemy of productive citizens in the 21st century.
[Copyright of Policy Futures in Education is the property of Symposium Journals.]

The theory-practice divide' in teacher education can be viewed not simply as an acceptance of a body of knowledge but instead an acceptance of the teacher educator's authority to determine what is relevant educational theory. This research aimed to explore student teachers' views of educational theory' and how it was discursively positioned relative to their practice in an attempt to examine whether their acceptance or rejection of it was also related to accepting the authority of the teacher educator. Using one-to-one interviews with 23 student teachers and employing a discourse analysis, four categories of students emerged. The paper describes these four categories and discusses the implications of these findings for initial teacher education and our understanding of the theory-practice' gap.

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the contribution of nonnative English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) to teaching English as an international language, the privileging of native English-speaking teachers (NESTs) and native-speaker competency, and concomitant marginalization of NNESTs, continues in many countries. To investigate and problematize the role the NEST-NNEST dichotomy plays in teachers' professional identity construction, this article explores the ways in which multiple discourses interact to enable and constrain opportunities for such construction through in-depth interviews with teachers in Hong Kong. It raises questions about the failure of previous investigations to adequately problematize discourses that establish and support divisions between Hong Kong teachers and also questions the assumption that such divisions are necessarily associated with perceptions of marginalization among those positioned as NNESTs. This article presents suggestions for contesting discourses that establish and support hierarchical relations between teachers and discusses the implications for future research.
[Copyright © 2016 Taylor & Francis.]

This article describes the results of a qualitative multiple case study investigation of the experiences of preservice teachers during a teaching practicum in Hong Kong. The study uses in-depth interviews with pairs of student teachers and their school-based supporting teachers to understand how the former positioned themselves as particular types of teachers through mutual interactions with other communities of teachers during a teaching practicum. Three case studies explore the ways in which the pairs of student teachers not only supported each other within the context of a teaching team, but also jointly deployed strategies to establish and defend the values of teaching and learning that were afforded a premium by their community of preservice teachers. The results underscore the importance of investigating relations between different communities, such as student teachers, school-based teachers and school authorities if the learning goals of the teaching practicum are to be attained. Implications for how relations that foster the professional development of all teachers within and across different communities during a teaching practicum might be achieved and sustained are discussed and implications for future research considered.
[Copyright © Routledge].

This paper is primarily based on a research project on blended teaching and learning. This emerging teaching and learning mode is gaining popularity in tertiary institutions because the new technologies have integrated the classroom and online teaching and learning into a potentially productive environment. The research project adopts a discourse analysis approach and intends to investigate the discourse features of blended teaching and learning in the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). The paper starts with the development of an analytical framework for classroom face-to-face (FTF) interaction and online computer-mediated communication (CMC), followed by discourse data analysis of a number of FTF and CMC teaching and learning sessions. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of the blended teaching and learning discourse analysis for the teachers and students in Hong Kong.
[Copyright © 2009 Formatex.]