Influence of Confucianism on teachers' knowledge of behavior management in Hong Kong schools

Hong Kong secondary teachers, as elsewhere, are concerned with students’ misbehaviour. In Hong Kong secondary schools, two teams of teachers, a guidance team and a discipline team, are formed to deal with this behaviour. This article examines how teachers made sense of their caring work and the strategies they adopted for behaviour management. Taking the interactionist perspective (Blumer, 1962, 1966), the framework suggested by Stebbin (1969, 1975) was adopted for exploring how teachers defined the situation in which they participated. Qualitative data were collected using interviews and classroom observation. Sixty teachers were interviewed. Eighteen classrooms were observed. The influence of the classical Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, emerging as a main theme from the data, was prominent, as its key principles were incorporated into the teachers’ personal system of caring. The findings illuminate the influence of Chinese culture in Hong Kong schools. Implications for the promotion of culturally responsive programmes for the promotion of pastoral care are drawn.