Teachers are difficult to change, and this has long been a challenge for many teacher educators because a fundamental maxim of teacher education programs is to promote reflection and change in teachers. Despite the many studies on teacher change, our understanding of teacher change requires further understanding. Based on a narrative inquiry of teacher “Blue”, the present study found that teacher resilience and reflection, as well as continuing professional development learning are the three most important factors that led to her self-initiated change. In addition, Blue’s change as a teacher developed along with her deepened and broadened reflection of her teaching content, and methods, as well as her beliefs about her students and other socio-cultural issues. Rather than refurbishing her entire belief and practice, Blue’s change was a gradual extension of her schema; she built her new ideas upon the old, through constant reflection, teacher learning, and with her resilience.

When Hong Kong became a British colony in 1842, the educational system was not centralized. However, after World War II, a wave of decolonization swarmed the globe. In 1945 an internal war broke out between the Chinese Communists and the Nationalists, resulting in the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and the Nationalists' retreat to the Taiwan region. Both sides attempted to shape the direction of education to influence Chinese habitants in Hong Kong. The British colonizer in Hong Kong, in order to safeguard their vested interests, decided to centralize the Chinese people's education and impose a series of curricular reforms, which acted to instill negative feelings or political indifference towards China among younger Hong Kong residents. Following the Bourdieusian theory of social reproduction by educational means, this paper proposes to foster and develop critical thinking regarding the colonial history of Hong Kong and the changing nature of the local Chinese identity as fostered in the school curriculum. This study found that the British colonizer imposed cultural arbitraries in the pedagogic action of the colonial Chinese curriculum and gradually established a colonial educational system that guaranteed the reproduction of the Hong Kong residents with little Chinese nationalism.

Against a background of promoting the industrialization of higher education in Macau due to COVID-19's damage to the territory's major industry—gambling, the present study adopted phenomenological psychology to explore teachers' lived experience of being pedagogical in a university with a neoliberal vision and mission. Using a general structure, the findings revealed that teachers encountered challenges being pedagogical. These challenges emerged not only due to the university's corporate management, but more importantly because of a shift in perceptions—where students became like customers and teachers became self-interested—which made pedagogical relationships difficult to establish. Furthermore, teachers were found to develop negative emotions when their pedagogical actions or intentions conflicted with neoliberalism. The findings suggest that pedagogy in higher education is being challenged and transformed.

Liberal studies (LS) textbooks used in Hong Kong public secondary schools have incurred controversy regarding perceived biased contents; however, what appears uncertain are what techniques the textbooks used to incite hostility towards the mainland of China and encourage students to participate in violent acts in Hong Kong. The present study used Michel Foucault’s order of discourse theory, particularly the “division and rejection” framework regarding the power of discourse to analyze five popular LS textbooks. The findings reveal that the textbooks depict a division between the fabricated irrational image of the mainland and the rational image of Hong Kong. Specifically, the textbooks paint Chinese patriotism as irrational while encouraging the student readers to reject their Chinese identity. The textbooks also create a division between altruistic and capable civilians and passive, silent ones, with the morality of the former being connected to violence and radicalism. In this way, the textbooks produce a discourse of hostility towards the mainland and the people in the mainland while encouraging violence.