Building cultural responsive classrooms: Teachers’ narratives of multicultural competency and its relationships with the cultural diverse needs of ethnic minority students in Hong Kong secondary schools

Abstract

Cultural diversity is an issue of both policy and practice for Hong Kong. In relation to the growing number of ethnic minority students in Hong Kong, many schools are exploring ways to enhance the multicultural competency of teachers and accordingly promote the cultural responsiveness in the classroom, so that the cultural diversity of ethnic minority students could be fulfilled and that their academic achievement could be improved. The paper examines how teachers and students construct the multicultural competency and cultural responsiveness. It specifically focuses on the learning needs of ethnic minority students, who came from India, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, and Thailand. The qualitative data were collected from interview, through which the views of twenty-four teachers from three secondary schools were explored. The themes generated from the interviews will be reported. This paper argues that to promote cultural diversity, it is not only necessary for the school and government to address and fulfill the diverse needs of students, in terms of the emotional, social, cultural and spiritual aspects of their “self”, but equally important to manage the dynamics of the different cultures and accordingly develop a connected ecology of learning in which cultural responsiveness can be made possible.