Hong Kong secondary geography teachers’ resilience in the testing time of the Covid-19: challenges and adaptations

Abstract

The outbreak of Covid-19 has posed serious challenges to schools and teachers as it forced schools to close and traditional face-to-face teaching was suspended. How did Hong Kong geography teachers respond to these challenges in the first nine months of the outbreak? How did they adapt to the social distancing measures such as school closure? Why did they adapt in the way they did? The researchers interviewed 18 teachers with different lengths of teaching experiences and teaching students of different academic abilities to answer these questions. It was found that even though there were few specific suggestions from the Government and their schools, the teachers interviewed, as a whole, have taken self-initiated steps to adapt teaching strategies and proactively try various means to help their students continue to learn under the constraints of the Pandemic.

Keywords:

• geography teaching
• Impact of pandemic
• teacher adaptation
• teacher resilience

Acknowledgement

We would like to express our deep gratitude to the 18 teachers who consented to be interviewed and provided their invaluable views that contribute to the writing up of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.