Return of the ghost – to discipline or/and to teach?

Abstract

This paper is a situated biographical reflection on the author's Hong Kong teaching experience written using a narrative inquiry approach, describing attempts to generate innovative pedagogical practices. The journey explores how autocratic, traditional Chinese cultural expectations in Hong Kong education have nurtured a commonsense belief in “discipline first and then teach”. This teacher/researcher adopted alternative approaches to authority through the use of developmental drama which made teacher image and teacher–student power relationships an object of talk and study. The aim of this paper is to bring together theories and pedagogical models based on the sociology of education, social psychology and drama pedagogy in an effort to change how we teach marginalized students in one distinctive Chinese cultural context.

Keywords:

• social psychology
• socialization
• drama pedagogy
• Chinese culture
• classroom discipline
• narrative inquiry

Notes

1. I suppose this Chinese utterance (literally meaning “born with a gold key in the mouth”) might at first be a careless variance of (i.e., “born with a silver spoon in the mouth”), with the common word which could mean both key and spoon. But in time it could become more culturally acceptable because it is interesting to note that in Chinese culture, the “gold houses” are something that everyone chases after, by way of learning, as is implied in the proverb, originally a poem written by an emperor to convince people to study hard, (“There are naturally gold houses in books”). The second half of the proverbial couplet is (“There are naturally white beauties in books”)!