Within the early childhood context, kindergarten teachers encounter day-to-day ethical dilemmas. These relate to the multiple obligations and responsibilities that kindergarten teachers have when working with different stakeholders, such as children, families, colleagues, organizations, and policy makers (Dahlberg & Moss, 2005; Feeney & Freeman, 2007). Although codes of ethics for teaching profession have been developed and applied in the worldwide, understanding professional ethics of early childhood teachers has been an underdeveloped area of study in Hong Kong. Using the ethical codes from three counties as the base, this study attempts to explore and develop the principles of professional ethics for Hong Kong early childhood sector. Those principles are conceived as an essential part of the professional repertoire which helps teachers make judgment and choices of action in the real-life workplace (Campbell, 2000; Mahoney, 2008). However, those principles are not exhaustive nor applicable to every situation. This study reports the suggested principles of professional ethics which are built on reviewing the extant ethical codes from international and regional contexts and collecting qualitative data from the semi-structured interviews with a total of 13 pre-service and in-service teachers. Findings reveals that professional ethics among early childhood education can be conceptualized into five domains. The interview data also reflect that the dimensions and meanings of professional ethics are varied among pre-service and in-service teachers. This study contributes to articulate dialogues about the notions of professional value, moral reasoning, professional autonomy, and teacher identity. Findings of this study reaffirm the responsibilities and obligations of kindergarten teachers, and this could be seen as a source of insights into the ethical base of teacher professionalism in Hong Kong early childhood context. Copyright © 2023 ISA, International Sociological Association

Self-regulation is arguably one of the most crucial predictors of school readiness, academic achievement, and lifelong well-being. While educators in the prior-to-school years have a pivotal role to play in stimulating growth in early self-regulation, less is known about their knowledge and practices in this area. This interview study was conducted with 71 kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong. Content analysis and descriptive statistics were employed to analyze the transcripts. We found that participants: (1) had a limited and superficial understanding of the notion of self-regulation; (2) estimated that approximately one quarter of their students displayed self-regulation problems; (3) had difficulties articulating what constitutes indicators for self-regulation problems in young children; and (4) lacked intervention strategies to strengthen children’s self-regulation, specifically preventive strategies. Educational policymakers, researchers, curriculum designers, teacher educators and school leaders are urged to better prepare early childhood practitioners in this area. Limitations and future research lines are discussed. Copyright © 2024 National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators.

In multicultural education, empathy has been regarded as an essential teacher disposition that enables teachers to better understand culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students through perspective-taking. However, less is known about the mechanism that underlies how empathy fosters teachers’ competence in supporting CLD students, i.e., their multicultural teaching competence. This study fills the research gap by investigating multicultural beliefs as a potential mediator between teacher empathy (operationalized via perspective-taking) and multicultural teaching competence (as indicated by knowledge, skills, and relationship-building abilities). A total of 445 Chinese preschool and kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong (188 pre-service and 257 in-service teachers) completed a self-report questionnaire assessing teacher empathy, multicultural beliefs, and multicultural teaching competence. Mediation analyses revealed that teacher empathy was related to higher support for multicultural beliefs, which in turn predicted better multicultural skills, knowledge, and relationship-building abilities. The multi-group analysis further indicated equivalent mediation paths for both pre-and in-service teachers. Extending past research underscoring empathy as an essential teacher disposition for multicultural teaching competence, the present study showed that the crucial role of empathy in transforming teachers’ belief in favor of multiculturalism helps foster teachers’ multicultural teaching competence. A practical implication of the present study calls for including perspective-taking and critical examination of teacher beliefs as key elements in teacher education programs that are aimed at facilitating early childhood teachers’ multicultural teaching competence. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Multicultural awareness is crucial for teachers to promote equity in culturally diverse classrooms (Cherng & Davis, 2019). Positive attitude towards diversity predicts stronger cultural sensitivity in teaching (Abacioglu et al., 2020). In Hong Kong where it lacks any policy towards multiculturalism, despite the growing number of non-Chinese multicultural learners, empirical support as to how pre-service teachers develop multicultural awareness and beliefs remains scant. This study analysed preservice teachers' perception of multicultural classrooms qualitatively to elucidate their multicultural awareness. It addressed two questions: 1) how do pre-service teachers understand cultural diversity in classrooms?; and 2) How do they perceive teachers' roles in responding to culturally diverse learners' needs? Nine ethnic Chinese pre-service teachers who joined an informal multicultural education programme in a Hong Kong teacher education university were interviewed. The data were transcribed, and coded with NVivo 12 based on the above questions. The analysis showed that preservice teachers demonstrated awareness of cultural differences in Hong Kong schools, suggesting that the intercultural contact and experiences the programme facilitated were effective. Cultural cliques among students, they believed, can promote quality of learning through co-ethnic peer interaction. Yet, they anticipated the need to go "out of their comfort zone" to teach in English, a language they regard as essential in meeting the learning needs of ethnic minority students more fully, especially those who were less proficient in Chinese language. Implications for research and teacher education for enhancing multicultural awareness in Hong Kong schools will be discussed. Copyright © 2023 World Education Research Association.

This paper reports the preliminary findings of an ongoing project to understand and compare the teaching practices and their contexts of teachers regarded by principals of some outstanding schools and the accomplished teachers who were awarded The Chief Executive's Award for Teaching Excellence (CEATE) by the Education Bureau in Hong Kong (Education Bureau, 2023) for their exemplary teaching practices. Most education systems, including Hong Kong and the USA, rely on principals to identify effective teachers, evidence of principals' subjective performance evaluations of teachers was reliable for identifying teachers who generated the most significant and most negligible achievement gains in students than those in the midrange (Jacob & Lefgren, 2008). Fifty-eight teachers from thirteen primary, secondary and special school sectors were recruited for lesson observations and interviews. The overall teaching quality between the two groups of teachers in systematic classroom observations was similar, suggesting that CEATE teachers did not necessarily perform significantly better in teaching. Interviews revealed that CEATE awards reflected incidental collaborations of teachers that were hard to replicate by other individual teachers or subject departments. Teacher learning networks also played a significant role where a mentor could support junior teachers. Distributed leadership promote collective capacities through organizational culture rather than enacting school policies and initiatives. These results contributed to establishing a new theoretical model that extends Gu and Day's (2007) teacher resilience theory to explain the professional growth of teachers and leaders as a function of context and organizational capacity in addition to resilience for achieving teaching quality sustainability. Copyright © 2023 World Education Research Association.

Internationally, there is a growing concern regarding insufficient preparation of the teachers in mainstream kindergartens to teach for ethnically diverse children. As teacher educators, we are concerned about how to facilitate kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong to improve their teaching. In this study, we adopt the research approach of phenomenography to investigate the research question of: What are the qualitatively different ways teachers experience teaching for ethnically diverse children? We conducted individual semi-structured interviews with 26 in-service kindergarten teachers. Four ways of experiencing were identified. Teaching for ethnically diverse children can be experienced as: adjusting instruction (A), expanding modes of expression (B), exploring new possibilities (C), and embracing inclusion (D). We recommend teacher educators to discuss our results with teachers in professional development programmes, making them aware of alternatives and appropriate more advanced ways of experiencing. Moreover, our results also reveal the benefits ethnically diverse children bring to all children. Copyright © 2023 HKERA-APERA.

Internationalisation of the curriculum (IoC) as an important element of internationalisation has seen many challenges. The literature shows that successful IoC cases are rare. Drawing on the concepts of powerful knowledge and 'knowing', we argue that a more comprehensive understanding of knowledge engagement in the IoC process is needed. Currently, engaging knowledge appears to be a barrier to IoC, particularly in hard disciplines such as science and engineering. This study investigated how faculty members from different disciplines engaged knowledge in their approaches to IoC through semi-structured interviews with 34 faculty members based in three Hong Kong universities. The findings show that engaging knowledge is indispensable to IoC because it provides theoretical foundations for 'being' and substantiates discussions on global issues using disciplinary lenses. Furthermore, faculty members from all disciplines show productive ways of engaging knowledge, whilst the differences lie in the expected role of 'knower' and the relationship between 'knowing' and 'being'. Specifically, facilitating an intimate relationship between 'knowing' and 'being' through students' own dispositions was featured in soft disciplines, whilst taking perspectives based on scientific principles was identified in hard disciplines. Copyright ©2023 Routledge.

This study examined the relationships between kindergartens teachers' emotional labour strategies and their relations to instructional leadership, trust in colleagues, teaching experiences, and teaching satisfaction. With a sample of 491 kindergarten teachers in Hong Kong, this study found that surface acting negatively predicted while deep acting and expression of naturally felt emotion positively predicted teachers' teaching satisfaction; instructional leadership and trust in colleagues were positively related to deep acting and expression of naturally felt emotion, respectively. Meanwhile, teaching experience was found to be positively related to their adoption of expression of naturally felt emotion and teaching satisfaction. These findings shed light on the nature of kindergarten teachers' work, and provide some implications for teacher development in kindergartens. Copyright © 2023 Springer.

The paper explores teachers’ endorsement of pastoral care, based on their socially and historically developed and interactively shaped understandings of teacher care, and how it surfaces in their practices. Participants are 25 academics in a self-financing teaching-oriented college in Hong Kong, in which teachers are also academic advisors for an assigned number of students and professional counselling is provided as another form of student support. The study identified three groups of teachers regarding their endorsement and enactment of pastoral care, namely, the supporters who are the overwhelming majority, the opponents and the bystanders. The author suggests that the relatively high level of endorsement and enactment of pastoral care found among the participants can be explained by its institutional, societal and cultural contexts. Implications of encouraging and facilitating teachers taking pastoral care as shared responsibility with professional counsellors in higher education are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Taylor & Francis.

In recent years, it seems that teachers in Hong Kong feel negatively about their work. To some extent, the negative emotional experiences may not only affect teachers’ well-being, but also the quality of schooling. Thus, it is necessary for us to pay attention to the phenomenon of teachers’ emotional experiences, especially the negative ones. In the literature, researchers have investigated teachers’ emotional experiences from the psychological perspective. Nevertheless, the psychological perspective may neglect the social impacts on teaches’ emotional experiences. The limitation may create an incomplete or inaccurate understanding about the phenomenon. In order to overcome the limitation, this article proposes a sociological research agenda for further investigation on the basis of symbolical interactionism. Copyright © 2014 Sjournals. All rights reserved.