Teachers as Learners

In movements of educational reform across the world, educators are forging new roles, identities and relationships. Leadership is of course vital, but needs to be rooted in a capacity for learning. This volume responds to some of the tensions and paradoxes typically associated with educational reform, presenting a critical discourse on teachers as learners. Contributing authors highlight a range of culturally related challenges that teachers should not face in isolation.

Sustainable teachers’ learning ideally requires a collective engagement to turn challenges into opportunities in the quest for meaningful professional development. This book offers a vision of a new relationship among educational workers as a joint force of learners in a cross-boundary endeavour aimed at a renewed moral commitment to education.

Ora KWO is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong. As a university academic who has been involved in teacher education for three decades, she specializes in research on professional development and on the processes of learning to teach. In 1997 she was awarded a University Teaching Fellowship by the University of Hong Kong in recognition of her excellence in teaching. Since then, her research interests have extended to the quality of teaching and learning in higher education, and to the building of learning communities. In 1999–2000 she held a Universitas 21 Fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Since 2001, she has been an Honorary Professor at Hangzhou Normal University in China, where she initiated the building of a learning community under the theme, “Teachers and Teacher Education in Action Learning” (TATEAL).