Hong Kong Chinese university students’ conceptions of teacher care: a dialectical framework of care

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses Hong Kong Chinese undergraduate students’ conceptions of teacher care informed by their experiences of teacher-student relationships within university context. Utilising the concept of teacher care from Nodding’s (1984) ethics of care from a Confucian-Vygotskian perspective, this research considers emergent themes of teacher care from the narrative accounts of final-year students majoring in management and bilingual studies. Results indicate that teacher care is perceived as a deepening of trust, mutuality, responsiveness, and reciprocity between students and teachers, and an enrichment of caring scope, embodied in the conceptualisation of ‘Pedagogical Care’ to ‘Holistic Care’ and then onto ‘Sustainable Care’. A dialectical framework of teacher care within Hong Kong higher education context is proposed, based on the psycho-social make-up of students and socio-cultural context of learning. This study exposes the importance of teacher care in students’ learning as influenced by relational dynamics, and proposes the adoption of caring pedagogy in universities.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher care
• ethics of care
• pedagogy
• Confucian-Vygotskian framework
• Hong Kong
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anne L. L. Tang

Anne L. L. Tang is Instructor at School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. Her research interests include teacher care, Vygotsky’s social constructivism and Confucian Heritage Culture.

Caroline Walker-Gleaves

Caroline Walker-Gleaves is a Professor of Education within the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University. Her research interests include teachers’ beliefs and behaviours, higher education pedagogy and inclusive education

Julie Rattray

Julie Rattray is Associate Professor in Higher Education at Durham University. Her research interests include the threshold concept framework, liminality, affective dimensions of learning as well as other aspects of policy and pedagogy in Higher Education. In particular she is interested in the ways that learners deal with troublesome knowledge and the extent to which affective characteristics and attributes might influence this