On the verge of ‘post-secondary education-for-all’ and deficit thinking: Teachers’ paradoxical identities towards minority students in Hong Kong

On the verge of ‘post-secondary education-for-all’ and deficit thinking: Teachers’ paradoxical identities towards minority students in Hong Kong

• Gao, Fang The Education University of Hong Kong
• Gube, Jan Christian C The Education University of Hong Kong

Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 2025

Routledge

2025

• M Teachers & Education for Teachers
  • MG Identities, Attitudes & Opinion of Educational Workers
• N Students & Student Services
  • NO Minorities & Immigrant Students

Teacher Identity Critical Poststructuralism Post-secondary Education (PSE) Minority Students

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Secondary Education

Despite the broadening participation in post-secondary education (PSE) worldwide, the conundrum of disproportionately low PSE enrolments among minority student populations continues to command scholarly attention. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on the identities of secondary school teachers in the context of minority choice and access to PSE. Taking a critical poststructuralist conceptualisation of teacher professional identity as the complex interplay of macro discourses and policies, school contexts, and individual agency, this study interviewed 11 senior secondary school teachers in Hong Kong and explored the ways in which they perceived and enacted professional identities when navigating dominant ideologies, institutional conditions, and PSE-going possibilities of minority students. The findings revealed their in-situ identity as PSE-for-all educators against the institutional backdrop of the numerical majority of minority students in the study school that also celebrated its demographic and cultural diversity and inclusion. However, the findings also reflected their saviourist tendencies that perpetuated the ethnic, classed, and gendered stereotypes towards minorities in Hong Kong society. Such contradictory identities signified their agentic demarcation from external structural inequalities and ‘minority deficiencies’, thereby seemingly dismissing their responsibility or culpability for the PSE under-representation of minorities. Copyright © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

• English

Journal Articles

• 13540602

• 10.1080/13540602.2025.2493137

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/ab881466

2025-11-04