Why Choose to Teach: Pre-Service Teachers, Beginning Teachers, and Career Switchers in Macau

This thesis reports a mixed methods case study of research into teacher recruitment in Macau, including a survey and in-depth interviews. The purpose of this research was to investigate and report reasons given for, constraints on, attractions of, incentives and disincentives in, expectations of, causes of, and challenges in pre-service teachers, beginning teachers, and career switchers in considering and deciding whether to be teachers in Macau, particularly in a situation of known over-supply of teachers and when pressures on teachers were increasing. The study finds that the decision to become a teacher in Macau is not taken lightly or rapidly by participants, and is the result of weighing up carefully the attractions and disincentives of a complex, comprehensive, and multiple set of factors, operating at many levels and in many dimensions, and underpinned by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems model and Ajzen’s theory of planned behaviour. At the point of deciding whether to be a teacher, individuals consider many issues concerning what it offers and what to do if their expectations are not met. The thesis shows that teaching has been a popular career choice in Macau mainly because of many interrelated individual and systemic factors that influenced people when they decided whether to study for an education degree and apply for a post in teaching.