Decoding the curriculum as progressive education from a pre-service teacher’s block practice in a primary school in Hong Kong: What we have learned?

This paper examines how the curriculum as text is decoded from a pre-service teacher‟s lived experience from her block practice in a primary school for about two months. An ethnographic study approach was adopted with critical incident and reflective journal writing as data collection methods. The data analysis was performed by a self reflective process by the researcher in the field, a research partner was employed as critical friend to facilitate critical reflection during the process. The findings showed a contrast of the pre-service teacher‟s view with another five serving teachers in the context of a primary five English teaching team, which can be characterized as “an ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory” (Pring, 2007) versus “memorization and drilling means learning”. In the study, the pre-service teacher carried out project learning on a unit theme in her block practice despite of the disagreement from the teaching team, the serving teachers in the teaching team were found to have developed conceptual, pedagogical, cultural and political dilemmas that prevent them from using learner-centred methods even they were recommended in the curriculum documents. The study suggests a case on how the curriculum text is interpreted in a complex process by the actors in schools, it suggests the need of re-culturing school to support learning and teaching by reevaluating the existing practice in classrooms in the 21st century. Copyright © 2009 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.