| This thesis employs the approach of Foucauldian archaeology and genealogy, as well as his conception of discourse, to study the trajectories of policy discourse of the Hong Kong General Teaching Council. The writer attempts to describe the genealogy of the discourse, and by this description, to interpret the phenomenon of the professionalization of Hong Kong teachers. Profession, policy and discourse are the three basic concepts of this study.; The result of this study reveals that the policy discourse of Hong Kong General Teaching Council, from 1982 to 2000, has undergone four epistemes: Professional Traits, Normalizing Governmentality, Professional Empowerment, and Quality Management. Under these epistemes, the identities of teachers were defined and redefined by various discursive communities. At the beginning, teachers were taken as members of the professional system in Hong Kong. This identity changed to union members and school employees under control in the second episteme. In the third stage, teachers were classified as professional practitioners, and eventually as the human resource invested by the government for the provision of quality education to society. These changes reveals that the position and identity of the parties taking part in the discourse, and the conceptions they used to interpret the world, determine their lines on the discourse of the issues of General Teaching Council and the attitudes towards teaching profession. The parties which involved in the discourse of Hong Kong General Teaching Council were outsider at the beginning, and changed in turn to governors, representatives of the education sector, and local participants. A discursive trend that evolved inwards from observants to participants can be found. The discontinuity of discourse can be demonstrated by two ruptures: firstly, professional traits turned into the discourse of ethical normalization; and, secondly, the discourse of striving for professional autonomy turned into that of the improvement of education quality.; The policy discourse of the establishment of a professional body reflects a unique phenomenon of the professionalization of Hong Kong teachers. The interpretation of such a discursive genealogy enlightens us as follows: whether a professional body can be set up is not the most important conclusion. It is more significant to reveal the conditions of the formation of various concepts in the policy trajectories, the relationships among these concepts, the primal forces of value judgements and the interaction between knowledge and power. This thesis concludes that discourses are emerged on the basis of historical accidents. In other words, discourses are the product of historical, societal and cultural context. Through discourses, advantages for the existence of subjects and the function of self-empowerment can be elaborated. A focus of the genealogy of the policy discourse of Hong Kong General Teaching Council is the interaction of knowledge and power. Different meanings were cast on the concept of professionalism at different discursive stages. Whether the parties in the discourse managed to manipulate knowledge determined their authority to define profession. In this sense, knowledge is the resource of a competition of power to define profession. On the contrary, the legitimation of knowledge is not a cognitive issue but the determination by power. The trajectory of the professionalization of Hong Kong teachers, as revealed by the genealogy of policy discourse described in this thesis, differs from the trait model and power model suggested by the sociology of profession. |
