Teachers' Identities and Life Choices

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.

1.Introduction

2.Hybridities, border crossing and yin-yang

3.Methodology

4.Dialectics of the Chinese culture: Continuities and changes in the Confucian order

5.Evolving hybrid femininities (yin) and masculinities (yang)

6.Intergenerational issues concerning primary school teachers

7.Teachers' professional identities and career choices when education reforms meet with Confucian cultural heritage in education

8.Mid-life secondary female teachers' identities, work and work-life interface

9. Struggling with gender borders: Implications for gender equity for the next generation

10.Conclusion