Teachers' Identities and Life Choices

This book discusses issues related to teachers’ identities and life choices when globalisation and localisation are enmeshed. It examines how competing cultural traditions and contexts acted as resources or/and constraints in framing teachers’ identities and their negotiations in the family and the work domains according to their gender positioning, their roles in the family such as husband, wife, father, mother, brother, sister, son and daughter and roles in the school such as principal, senior teacher or regular teacher. Contrary to an essentialist approach to identity and culture, teachers’ stories show that their identities and life choices were hardly free choices; but were often part and parcel of the culture and contexts in which they were embedded.

Teachers’ identities are found to be fluid, complex, hybrid and multifaceted. Using Hong Kong as a case study, this book provides not only traces of the continuity and changes of Confucian self and cardinal relationships but also a glimpse of how educational reform as neo-capitalist discourses in the workplace interacts with Confucian cultural traditions creating new hybrid practices (problems or possibilities or both) in the school and in the daily lives of teachers.

‘The work on teacher identity tends to be “inward looking” i.e within the field only, whereas this [book] links broader issues to the lived experiences of actual teachers. The Hong Kong experience will have broad relevance – and not just in Confucian-heritage cultural settings. In addition, the accessible writing and broad contextualisation regarding globalisation suggest it will be very relevant to educators in most countries. I think it (this book) would complement recent work on teacher identity by major figures such as Janet Alsup, June, Beynon, or Ian Hextall, and update some of the older work e.g. Andy Hargreaves, Ivor Goodson etc’

 - Professor Marie Brennan, Victoria University, Melbourne

 ‘Dr Pattie Luk has worked in this area for some time focussing on teacher identities in these uncertain times. The uniqueness of her work is in its cultural position. She is one of the few educators whose work comes specifically from a Chinese perspective. The book is theoretically rich in considering a diversity of views although there is of course a heavy weight on Eastern perspectives. But this is a strength, in my view, since these are largely missing from the large body of Western literature on this topic.More needs to be known about the distinctiveness of Eastern cultures and this book can make an important contribution in this regard.’
 - Professor Kerry Kennedy, Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong

LUK-FONG Yuk Yee Pattie holds a BA (Geography) and a MEd (Curriculum) from the University of Hong Kong, a MAEd (Counselling) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a PhD degree (Education) from the University of Canberra, Australia. She is currently an adjunct associate professor of the Department of Special Education and Counselling at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). For over three decades she has been a teacher educator: first in the teaching of geography, then in  school guidance and counselling. She has worked respectively as a secondary school teacher, Teaching Consultant of the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong, and Senior Lecturer and Principal Lecturer at the Grantham, the Sir Robert Black and the Northcote Colleges of Education in Hong Kong. She joined the HKIEd in 1994 and worked there as associate professor until her retirement in 2011. Her primary research foci are: guidance and counselling, self and personal identities, gender identities in teachers, and family changes. She developed and taught undergraduate and post-graduate courses on guidance and counselling, the Self and Personal Development module for Liberal Studies, and School-Based Family Counselling. She has published in over 25 international academic journals and over 15 book chapters, including “Competing Contexts for Developing Personal and Social Education in Hong Kong”(Comparative Education, 2001) and “Towards a Hybrid Conceptualization of Chinese Women Primary School Teachers’ Changing Feminities – A Case Study of Hong Kong” (Gender and Education, 2011). She co-edited with Dr Lee Man Yuk Ching the book, ‘School Guidance: Trends and Practices” (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). Dr Luk-Fong is a founding member of the HKIEd’s Gender Matters Group, and the Consortium of Institutes on Family in the Asian region (CIFA). She was also the recipient of the Award for Outstanding Contribution toSchool-Based Family Counselling (Oxford Symposium in School-Based Family Counselling) in 2011.