Are “Textbooks ” a barrier for teacher autonomy? A case study from a Hong Kong Primary school.

Abstract

This case study provided insights into the ways in which ‘textbooks’ can be used during capacity building professional development on a sliding scale. The evidence suggests that the informants of this study use of ‘textbooks’ is driven by a number of factors in a reskilling process designed to support teachers in a collaborative arrangement. We argue that where a commercially produced ‘textbook’ is used as a supporting reference point in association with a strong ‘sharing leadership’ that promotes collaborative and ‘a critical friend’ relationships across a whole school, it is possible for ‘textbooks’ to be an important factor in facilitating increased teacher autonomy to plan curriculum, but there remains the potential for a recursivity of how things were known and practiced in ‘textbooks’, unless there is a way for teachers to locate their subjectivity and complicity.