Abstract

In this article, I describe a real incident regarding the bargaining between students’ poetic creativity and teacher’s disciplinary power at a secondary school that I once taught in Hong Kong. Pseudonyms are used. A general context on taboos surrounding sexuality in Hong Kong will first be reviewed. In the second part, I will examine the implications of the incident for engendering education pertaining to the three domains of moral conformity, construction of gender and sexuality, and the use of power. In the third part, I will discuss some alternatives of the management of this incident drawing on postmodernist theories of critical pedagogies (Gore, 1992; Lin, 2004), liberal-feminist pedagogies (Paechter, 2006; Epstein and Johnson, 1998; Weiler, 2009) and critical reading pedagogies (Kennedy, 2002; Smith, 1999) to nurture teacher awareness of their own professional and personal growth. If the schooling process is essentially a social phenomenon, then this reflexive research foregrounds the sociopolitical, cultural and pedagogical situatedness of researching human communication and activities.