When good mission faces the reality: Investigating student teachers' curriculum orientation in a globalized educational context

The school curriculum of a community often carries its own values, belief and philosophy on education - academic terminologies such as "orientation" are often used,, while some call these words as "ideology" (Morris and Bob, 2009). Eisner and Vallance (1974) categorize curriculum orientation into 6 kinds; they are Religious orthodoxy, Rational humanism, Progressivism, Critical theory, Reconceptualism, and Cognitive Pluralism. Schiro (1978) has proposed 4 curricular ideologies: the social efficiency ideology; the scholar academic ideology; the child study ideology; and the social reconstruction ideology. Various categorization exists among other scholars but they are categorized in a similar way. By administering a test of the curriculum ideology for a total of 80 preservice teachers, the researcher intends to probe into the curriculum orientation of the student teachers in Hong Kong. Supplemented by qualitative data obtained from interviews, the researcher proceeds to understand their perceptions of the official values in curriculum and educational policies in Hong Kong. The researcher would also prompt the student teachers to evaluate the teacher education curriculum in which they are receiving locally as oppose to their own curriculum orientation. Through analyzing such simple quantitative and qualitative datum, the presenter wishes to examine if any difference(s) or gap(s) in curriculum values exist between preservice teachers and the existing official curriculum in the local context; as well as that between these informants and local teacher education curriculum. With this in mind, the researcher would reflect upon possible threat and Opportunities that local teacher education institutes and the policy-makers should take into consideration in the future, so as to improve and to achieve harmony in the local and globalized educational context.