Abstract:

Recently, ethical thinking has turned away from universalist approaches to ethics, towards a postmodern understanding of professionalism in early childhood education. Rather than following a prescribed set of rules based on what one is obliged to do in general terms, a postmodern approach to ethics requires early childhood teachers to consider their responsibilities in specific situations. A postmodern ethic demands that early childhood professionals engage with critical reflection about knowledge and truth. However, it is still unclear how critical reflection and a postmodern ethic might be understood within the context of Hong Kong. The purpose of this project is to develop, implement, and evaluate pedagogies and assessments that support early childhood preservice and inservice teachers’ critical reflection that enables them to develop a culturally appropriate postmodern ethic.

Code:

T0099

Principal Project Supervisors:

• BLAISE, Mindy
• YUEN, Wai Kwan Gail

Subjects:

• Early childhood teachers -- Professional ethics
• Early childhood education -- Moral and ethical aspects

Start Date:

01 Jun 2011

End Date:

30 Jun 2013

Status:

Completed

Result:

This project was designed to trouble professionalism from a postmodern perspectives. Asking students to do case writing and analysis as a form of pedagogy and assessment and in turn using the cases as a research tool to examine practices in teacher education and their connection to practices in the field of early childhood education proved to be very fruitful and revealing. There are serious implications pertaining to how teachers should be developed, enculturated and supported given complex contextual issues. The numerous cases produced by preservice and inservice teachers have contributed to a wealth of teacher narratives that can be used as an effective tool of knowledge transfer for other course teaching, professional engagement or academic activities.

Impact:

This project has succeeded in bridging the gap between practice and research through examining our own practices as teacher educators. By building a collaborative learning community to support each other to investigate one’s own practice, both teaching and research capacities have been enhanced.

Financial Year:

2010-11

Type:

TDG