Section archive - Theories & Approaches

This article explores an example of messy collaboration that occurred in the context of a Learning Study conducted in a secondary school in Hong Kong working in partnership with education faculty from a local tertiary institution. The article analyses the dynamics of the interactions between the participants in this Learning Study by drawing on the literature on micropolitics.

This article explores the theoretical foundations of place-based education (PBE). The authors argue that there is a place for PBE in schools but contend that it must be informed by a far more critical reading of the notions of ‘place’, ‘identity’ and ‘community’. The authors use an empirically grounded study to illustrate the potential benefits and limitations of PBE, and conclude with some suggestions as to how schools and teacher education programs might promote the development of socially critical approaches to PBE.

The current paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the experiences of a group of English language teachers from the Chinese mainland. The teachers completed their teacher training in Hong Kong and have taken up full-time teaching positions in secondary schools within Hong Kong. The study examines the participants' discursive and participative practices to illustrate how their experiences, both as students in the Chinese mainland and as preservice teachers in Hong Kong, shaped their construction of teacher identities, as well as to show that their employment in Hong Kong schools represented a challenge to this identity formation process.

In this study, the author investigates the early racial and cultural views of John Dewey.