This article reports the results of a multiple qualitative case study which investigated the challenges that seven early career English language teachers in Hong Kong confronted as they constructed their professional and personal identities. A series of in-depth interviews with participants during the entire first year of their full-time teaching experience provided a longitudinal perspective on the teachers’ experiences of becoming teachers. A contribution of this study is to examine such experiences using the analytical lens of teacher identity. The case studies illustrate that these teachers faced considerable challenges in constructing teacher identities as they negotiated the dominant discourses of teaching and learning within individual Hong Kong schools. It is argued that school-based support for early career teachers should include the problematisation of the identity positions available to all teachers within the profession as a whole in order to support the construction of the professional and personal identities that these teachers place a premium upon. Implications for teacher education and future research are also discussed.
[Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis.]

This paper aims to study the perception of primary curriculum implemented in Hong Kong through the views of school practitioners and how the gaps were closed through school practice. Parts of the data in this paper were collected through interviews with principals and teachers on their the views of achieving the aims of the Hong Kong primary education curriculum. Their practice and effort in achieving the aims in education is recorded and analyzed. They were asked to pinpoint professional areas which they thought teachers may have difficulties and hence a barrier for the improvement of quality education and achieving the educational aims. These include opinions on subject content and pedagogical knowledge for the primary school subject in Chinese and mathematics and in turns reflect the contents needed in teacher education program. The paper provides insight for future teacher education program development and primary schools to distinguish practice that could be used by them.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

This is a narrative self study of the professional experience of a teacher educator on identity education in Hong Kong. In the process of promoting a set of teaching strategies to teacher educators, in-service and pre-service teachers of history and civic education, he was able to explore their perceptions on identity education for youngsters in Hong Kong after her political handover in 1997. It was found that while even educators felt ambivalent about their identities as Hong Kong Chinese, the directions and approaches for identity education also became controversial in the educational field in Hong Kong. This inquiry has demonstrated, with global significance, both the complexity of the issue of identity and the challenges of promoting identity education on a politically shifting landscape.

Self-concept is one of the most widely researched psychological constructs in such related disciplines as educational psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology. The significance of self -concept lies in the facts that it has been shown to be closely related to other psychological constructs such as academic achievement (for reviews, see Hattie, 1992; Marsh, Byrne & Shavelson, 1992), neurosis and maladjustment (Rogers, 1981), self-schema (Cross & Markus, 1994), mood and self-evaluation (for reviews, see Brown & Mankowski, 1993), which are of great concerns among educators and psychologists. In Hong Kong, few studies has been done to assess the self-concept of pre-service full-time student teachers. The purpose of this paper is to report findings from one of the newly developed instrument based on the Shavelson, Hubner, and Stanton (1976) multidimensional, hierarchical model, the Personal and Academic self-concept Inventory (PASCI: Fleming & Whalen, 1990), and to compare findings of this study with previous findings as reported by Fleming and Whalen (1990), and Watkins, Regmi and Alfon (1990). The subjects were 227 either first year or second year full-time students enrolling in four similar teacher training programmes at the Institute of Education in Hong Kong. 63 male and 163 female (1 gender unknown) were included in the sample, with a mean age of 21 years . The instrument was a three-section, self-report questionnaire. Section A was an invitation letter explaining the purpose of the study and ensuring confidentiality. Section B was the Chinese version of PASCI. PASCI is an expanded version of Fleming and Courtney's (1984) Self-Rating Scale (SRS) which in turn evolved from the Feelings of Inadequacy Scale (Janis & Field, 1959). Its subscales are designed to measure global, social, physical, and academic components of self-concept grounded on Shavelson's (1976) model. Section C was used to collect respondents' demographic information including sex

In view of the recent movement for increasing the schools' involvement in the school experience, the Hong Kong Institute of Education has introduced a new form of school experience in its 4-year full-time Bachelor of education programme. The schools take up a more active and supportive role, which aim to facilitate the development of the student-teachers. During these periods, the schools, the peers and the lecturers have significant influence on the learning experience of the student-teachers. In the programme, the field experience in year 1 includes a one-week attachment period to the kindergarten and a two-week attachment to the primary school. The aim of this paper is to describe the learning experience of the student-teachers during the early stages of the programme. Twenty student-teachers who were randomly sampled from the year 1 cohort were interviewed at the end of their first year of study in the programme. The interview questions were focused to find out the learning experience of the student-teachers in the field experience; the interactions between the student-teachers with their peers; the support that they perceived from the school and the lecturers; their perception about being a primary teacher in school. The findings of the study were interpreted with a sociocultural view of learning which defines learning to teach as influenced by the interactions between the participants of the system including those between student-teachers themselves, those between the student-teachers and the lecturers and those between the school (the teachers, pupils and administrators) and the student-teachers. Implications on teacher education are drawn from the experience and support from the school context to the student-teachers in learning to teach is recommended.

Teachers play an important role in delivering health education to empower students with skills for healthy living to prevent non-communicable diseases. One of the common non-communicable diseases is hypertension that its development is highly associated with unhealthy lifestyle. A survey was administered to assess 130 pre-service teachers and 54 in-service teachers who were taking the health education course to prepare them for teaching the content of healthy living in Hong Kong. The assessment included their knowledge level of hypertension, attitudes towards lifestyle modification education to students, perception of knowledgeable to give health education. It was found that the knowledge level related to hypertension was generally below average among the teachers. Although they considered that lifestyle modification was an effective way to enhance students’ well-being, both pre-service and in-service teachers were reluctant to take responsibility for lifestyle modification education to their students. Lack of skill training was perceived as a problem. Teachers’ perception on health education should not be limited to the provision of simple information and advice. There is a need to improve teachers’ health literacy on some common non-communicable diseases.
[Copyright © 2015 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.]