With the publication of Educational Reform Consultation document in 2000, teachers in Hong Kong are required to engage in various kinds of professional programs to upgrade their professional knowledge and develop identity in the teaching profession to meet the challenges. This longitudinal study comes about with the foci put on first, investigating my professional development journey as the panel head and curriculum planner of Personal Social and Humanities Education Key Learning Area (PSHE KLA) in a local new school. Second, exploring how the gained experience can be explained by “professional learning community” (Myers & Simpson, 1998) and “community of practice” (Wenger, 1998). This study used an autoethnographic approach and was conducted under the framework of participatory action research. Critical incidents were collected for interpretive analysis and triangulation of the research findings.

 

As a matter of fact, local teachers are not encouraged to engage in systematic longitudinal research to enhance their professional development or satisfy their professional needs. The values of this study, therefore, grounded on the belief that it can help myself and colleagues in the same profession to acquire propositional, procedural or disposition knowledge that are needed to improve teaching practices; generate outcomes that can help improve students’ learning and teachers’ teaching; contribute to the establishment of the school “professional learning community” and “community of practice”; help generate experiences for other practicing teachers to conduct reflective teaching and enkindle the local and collective professional understandings of teacher practices in the local contexts.

 

Since the collection of the interview data is still in progress, the interpretive data analysis, based on the written data collected, is at the preliminary stage only. The results to be presented are mainly narrative account derived from the initial understanding of the learning process that the researcher and her colleagues engaged in during the study period.

With the official publication of Educational Reform Consultation document in 2000, teachers in Hong Kong are required to engage in various kinds of professional programs to upgrade their professional knowledge and develop identity in the teaching profession to meet the challenges. This 2-year longitudinal study comes about with the foci put on first, investigating my professional development journey as the panel head and curriculum planner of Personal Social and Humanities Education Key Learning Area (PSHE KLA) in a local new school. Second, exploring how such experiences gained can be explained by “professional learning community” (Myers & Simpson, 1998) and “community of practice” (Wenger, 1998).

 

To make explicit the relationships of the aims of the study, the following key research question is proposed:

 

 

The process of teacher professional development involves a close linkage between both individual and organization learning. In this study, both “community of practice” and “professional learning community” are chosen as major theoretical frameworks to help understand how one’s professional journey can be developed through on-going reflective practices. “Community of practice” which refers to groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly, offers a useful framework to research into the social learning processes in the school context (Wenger & Lave, 1991; Wenger, 1998). While “professional learning community” is defined as a school cultural setting in which every participant is responsible for both the learning and the overall well-being of everyone else, and develops with intention to upgrade students’ learning and to enhance organizational capacity (Myers & Simpson, 1998). To come up with a more pragmatic framework to help analyze the data obtained in this study, a tentative framework with the elements and indicators derived from both community of practice and professional learning communities is developed and shown in Figure 1.

 

<Inert Figure 1 Here>

 

This study adopts an autoethnographic approach which offers audiences access to personal experiences with the intent of politicizing aspects of human experience and social sense-making (Alexander, 2005). Although autoethnography has its critics as being self-indulgent, solipsistic and narcissistic, it is still regarded to be the only best way to conduct this study because no one is better than an insider who can eliminate the issue of accessibility, permissibility and unobtrusiveness. Also, using autoethnography matches with the nature of the theoretical framework of “community of practice” which treasures the immersion in the community and the observation from the inside (Benzie, et al., 2005). In fact, there are measures to ensure legitimacy and representation of autoethnographic study such as developing a well-defined study boundary and protocol, ensuring instrumental utility and using a chain of evidences to ensure validity (Duncan, 2004). Holt claimed that “autoethnography is not necessarily limited to the self because people do not accumulate their experiences in a social vacuum” (2003, p.16). In other words, the experiences with which the researcher shares are actually the outcomes of the interactions among key people in the context. They are actually sharing the narratives together.

 

To fully demonstrate the values of autoethnographic approach in this study, qualitative data is derived under the framework of participatory action research which is based on repeated cycles of planning, acting, observing and reflecting. Reflective journals on critical incidents, artifacts, audio records of subject meetings, videos of public lectures conducted by the researcher, and interview data are collected for interpretive analysis and triangulation of the research findings.

 

The study period just ended in August 2006. Interviews with the key informants are still in progress. Therefore, the interpretive data analysis, based on the written data collected, is at the preliminary stage only. The results to be presented are mainly narrative accounts derived from the initial understanding of the learning process that the researcher and her colleagues engaged in during the study period. Table 1 suggests the main foci in this interim report.

 

<Insert Table 1 Here>

 

As a matter of fact, local teachers are not encouraged to engage in systematic longitudinal research to enhance their professional development or satisfy their professional needs. The values of this study is therefore grounded on the belief that it can help myself and other colleagues in the same profession to acquire propositional, procedural or disposition knowledge that are needed to improve teaching practices; generate outcomes that can help improve students’ learning and teachers’ teaching; the establishment of the school “professional learning community” and “community of practice”; and enkindle value experiences on other practicing teachers to conduct reflective teaching so as to promote the local and collective professional understandings of teacher practices in local contexts.