Creating culturally responsive classrooms: The professional knowledge landscape of ethnic minority teachers’ cross-cultural experience in Hong Kong schools

Abstract

Many Hong Kong schools are concerned with the growing number of enrolment of ethnic minority students. This article examines ethnic minority teachers’ cross-cultural experience and their view of the diverse needs of ethnic minority students and how these needs were fulfilled. Qualitative data were collected from unstructured interviews, where the views of fifteen teachers of Pakistani, Indian, Canadian, Pilipino, from three primary and three secondary schools, were explored. This finding was illuminated by the interview study, showing that the diverse learning needs of ethnic minority students and their classroom behavior were culturally different from the majority of Hong Kong Chinese students. To manage the classroom diversity and promote cultural responsiveness, the teachers struggle for conceptualizing a new rationale for cultural responsiveness to diversity, developing a sense of inter-cultural sensitivity and promoting cultural responsiveness to diversity. This paper argues that like students, teachers simultaneously engage in a crossculture process through which they learn the culture of ethnic minority students, re-learn the culture of their own and re-think about the relevant rationale underlying cultural responsiveness. For ethnic minority group of school practitioners, there was a need to give them hope as a way to get them motivated to learn, face new challenges and explore the new opportunities. At last, the implication of the creation of a culturally responsive classroom will be given.