A comparative study of international and local school teacher's perceptions and enactments of humility in Hong Kong

Abstract

While humility has been widely explored philosophically and psychologically, there is little research on humility in educational settings. Based on semi-structured interviews with teachers from local and international schools, we investigated the role of humility in the pedagogy and wider contexts of schools in Hong Kong. Both international and local teachers regarded humility as being important for education, but they conceptualized and enacted it differently, reflecting the high power distance of Hong Kong’s Confucian heritage culture and teacher-centeredness of traditional Chinese education, and the more social constructivist form of pedagogy in international education. These findings provide a lens to understand how teaching and teacher-student relations are shaped by cultural, pedagogical, and educational philosophies and practices in different educational settings.