The paper explores teachers’ endorsement of pastoral care, based on their socially and historically developed and interactively shaped understandings of teacher care, and how it surfaces in their practices. Participants are 25 academics in a self-financing teaching-oriented college in Hong Kong, in which teachers are also academic advisors for an assigned number of students and professional counselling is provided as another form of student support. The study identified three groups of teachers regarding their endorsement and enactment of pastoral care, namely, the supporters who are the overwhelming majority, the opponents and the bystanders. The author suggests that the relatively high level of endorsement and enactment of pastoral care found among the participants can be explained by its institutional, societal and cultural contexts. Implications of encouraging and facilitating teachers taking pastoral care as shared responsibility with professional counsellors in higher education are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Taylor & Francis.

Many Hong Kong schools are concerned about the growing number of ethnic minority students. How they are supported and how the diversity of their pastoral needs is fulfilled become critical. This article examines teachers', students' and parents' narratives of the cross-cultural experience of ethnic minority students from India, Pakistan, Philippines, Nepal and Thailand, and the diversity of those students' pastoral needs. The qualitative data were collected from interviews, through which the constructs of 32 teachers and 32 students from three secondary schools were explored. Four groups of focus-group interviews were conducted, in which 15 parents were involved. This article argues that to implement the ethos of caring, it is not only necessary for the school to promote the intercultural sensitivity of all practitioners, but equally important to develop a connected school system where ethnic minority students and parents can be consistently supported in the subsystems of classroom, school and home.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03055690903425383]