Disadvantaged students increasingly confront ruthless competition for higher education degrees, while losing out on opportunities for social mobility. Some of Hong Kong’s low-income households defy the trend: families take on risk, including considerable debt, to send their offspring abroad, rather than test their chances at home by dealing with competitive learning silos, stratified schooling, social status anxiety, and failing employer support. Drawing on stakeholder theory, the “glonacal agency” heuristic and the existentialist perspective, this paper examines how some low-income families break the cycle of disadvantage by tapping into the powers, legitimacy and urgency of “important others,” allowing them to harness local and global resources to achieve social mobility. Copyright © 2015 James Nicholas Publishers.

This edited book highlights the identities and practices of ethnically diverse families and schools in contexts where multicultural policies are not always a priority. In an era of globalization and ensuing population mobility, it places a focus on Asia-Pacific, a continent with diverse customs, populations, and languages, but grapples with what it might mean to be multicultural.The book features studies and frameworks that illustrate how minoritized communities engage with the diversity they live in and strategies in adjusting and adapting to their sociocultural environments, including practices that might support these efforts. This book represents initiatives and interdisciplinary scholarship from Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, Australia, South Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan, which underscore the intersection of identities, cultural values, efforts, conflicts, and religions in making diversity work in their contexts. Collectively, these works make a unique contribution by invigorating debates on the flows and evolvement of cultural values and practices within and across families and institutions.This book will appeal to researchers, practitioners, and readers with interest in the current state of cultural diversity among minoritized families in Asia-Pacific and beyond. Copyright © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Jan Gube, Fang Gao and Miron Bhowmik; individual chapters, the contributors.

升讀專上教育（專教）一直被視為香港青年上游的途徑，不同社經背景的學生所面對升讀專教的挑戰各有差別。近年，香港教育政策推動多元發展並提供多項支援和計畫，以提升中學生畢業後的發展路向，但不同學生組群在升學上都遇到不同障礙和不同程度的教育不均情況。由於學生的社經和族群背景影響他們對升學與就業的價值觀、期望和目標，他們追求專教面對的障礙和成功因素各有不同，惟香港對此問題的系統化探討不多。為此，本實證研究探討香港主流、內地來港和少數族裔（南亞／東南亞裔）高中生升讀專教所面對的障礙和成功因素，於2018年10月至2019年5月期間在23所香港中學進行問卷調查，合共成功收回5,014名高中生的問卷，發現主流學生雖然在經濟障礙和其他封頂因素的評分均低於少數族裔及新來港學生，但同樣地在多項有利升讀專教的成功因素上的評分亦較後兩者低，而少數族裔則比華裔群體樂觀。本文討論了當中原因，並提供相關的政策建議。Copyright ©2021 香港中文大學香港教育研究所.

Limited research has been conducted on community college (CC) transfer students' (TS) experiences in four-year universities, particularly in Asian contexts. To fill this research gap, in this qualitative study, 124 TS from various disciplines in a Hong Kong university participated in 39 focus groups and seven individual interviews. Unlike their Western counterparts, our TS were relatively better prepared and more academically adaptive. Nevertheless, their social integration was restricted by a lack of time for extra-curricular activities, a sense of inferiority and incompetence, and restricted social circles that did not enable interaction with non-TS. These challenges and their implications are discussed. In particular, this study has highlighted differences between the special education systems for CC transfer in Hong Kong and those in Western CC models. The study has also highlighted the study-induced stress, and poor self-perceptions that TS experience, despite their academic abilities. Copyright ©2021 MDPI.

Infants and toddlers (birth to age 3) learn what it means to be members of, and to belong to and be accepted by, their societies by adopting behaviors, attitudes, manners, and ways of thinking that are deeply rooted in what is valued in their culture. Infant and toddler teachers play a pivotal role as transmitters and maintainers of culture when they make decisions about the curriculum, engage in caregiving interactions, make pedagogical decisions, and use language. Cultural meanings ascribed to teachers’ practices in 1-year-old care in the United States and Hong Kong were examined using video data and transcripts of video-elicited focus group discussions. Three important areas in which cultural transmission differed between the United States and Hong Kong relate to: egalitarian versus hierarchical societal structure; individualism versus collectivism; and different goals for independence. Social learning theory and ecological systems theory framed this study and informed interpretation of results. Copyright © 2021 Taylor & Francis Inc.

Parents as the primacy agent of socialization are important to influence students’ educational pathways they are undertaken after compulsory education. Past studies have found that parents’ social status and family resources have intertwined effect on the differential patterns of educational expectation between students from different socio-cultural milieu. Those studies indicated that students from high socioeconomic background with more family resources are more likely expecting to pursue university degree than those of low socioeconomic groups. Parental involvement, as one of family cultural socialization exists in different forms, is conducive to support their children in their process of navigation to post-secondary education.The present paper attempts to link these three dimensions of family factors – family socioeconomic status, family resources and parental involvement, and to study their relationships with adolescents’ expectations to reach post-secondary education. The data were drawn from a recent longitudinal study which was an extension of PISA 2021. A total of 3,000 students aged 15 years in Hong Kong have participated in the subsequent survey. The logistic regression model was deployed to address the research question: to what extent family socioeconomic background, family resources and parental involvement predict students’ expectation of pursuing university degree. In particular, the relative contributions of different forms of parental involvement were clarified while student academic background was also controlled.The results affirm the persistence of inequalities on structural regularities that are linked to parents’ occupation and cultural possession. Nevertheless, the role of parent involvement in social communication with their children has significant relationship with students’ expectation on going to university, regardless of parent’s social status, family resource and student’s academic background. The findings may pose the need to strengthen

The COVID-19 outbreak led to switch from face-to-face classes to virtual mode of teaching. This emerging phenomenon requires adopting new educational policies and strategies for synchronous learning at home. This study develops a conceptual model by investigating the holistic supports for kindergarten teachers, children and families. There are well-documented studies reporting on the relationships between families’ social backgrounds, home learning environment and experiences (e.g. Foster et al., 2005; Hartas, 2011). However, few studies have shown a connection to conceptualize holistic model through investigating contextual sources of support on home learning (Kluczniok et al., 2013). In coping with the challenges and limitations of home learning, Hong Kong government and kindergartens develop various measures, schemes and plans of action to facilitate teachers and families adopting different e-learning approaches and using educational resources. This study draws on the multiple data from policy documents, reports and empirical studies to analyze the impacts of policy implementation and educational programmes. The ethical issues are considered throughout the study. Five themes have been identified from the policy discourses and empirical evidence, including preparedness, adaption, affordance, responsive and transparency. Findings of this study show that a quick adjustment on information flow, social support and parenting practices that could influence the quality of home learning experience for children. This study offers an integrated view on identifying multiple sources of support that are conducive to children’s home learning. It gives insights into building a collective repertoire of educational practices for parents and teachers to adopt during the “New Normal” period. Copyright © 2021 EECERA.

In learning environments research, limited attention has been paid to the effects of the family environment on student thinking. This study constructed a five-dimension survey of the family environment, based on previous studies of the classroom learning environment, and used it to compare the effects of the family environment and the classroom learning environment associated with an interdisciplinary course (i.e., Liberal Studies) on the critical thinking disposition of 2189 secondary students in Hong Kong. Stepwise regression revealed that: the overall effects of the classroom learning environment of Liberal Studies on critical thinking disposition were greater than those of the family environment; the content-oriented dimensions of both environments were stronger predictors of critical thinking disposition than the relationship-oriented dimensions of both environments; and the effect of the dimension of challenging task on critical thinking disposition was stronger than that of other pedagogy-oriented dimensions. Also the means of all dimensions of the family environment were significantly lower than those of the corresponding dimensions of the classroom learning environment. It is suggested that more effort should be made to enhance both classroom learning environment and family environment to generate convergent forces to efficiently cultivate students’ critical thinking. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

It is commonly believed that ethnic minority (EM) parents tend to have low expectation towards their children’s education due to adverse social and economic status, but other studies suggest EM parents would have high expectation because they want their children to gain upward social mobility. In this study, we compared Pakistani parents’ expectation towards early childhood education (ECE) with Hong Kong parents and examined the role of acculturation in Pakistani parents’ expectation towards ECE. Participants were 73 first-generation Pakistani parents living in Hong Kong and 214 Hong Kong parents. They filled in questionnaires that measured expectation towards ECE. Pakistani parents also answered a questionnaire that captured the degree of acculturation. Results of moderation analysis revealed significant interactions between culture and child gender in all the dimensions of parental expectation towards ECE. Specifically, Pakistani parents reported higher expectation towards ECE than Hong Kong parents. Moreover, Pakistani parents generally reported significantly higher expectation for boys than for girls, while Hong Kong parents’ expectation towards girls was significantly higher than boys with a few exceptions. Moreover, regression analyses showed that integration and marginalization were positively related to several dimensions of parental expectation. These findings provide pioneer understanding about expectation towards ECE among Pakistani parents in Hong Kong and shed light on the promotion of gender-equality ECE. Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

As a regional hub for education, Hong Kong has seen a growing population of international students. In contrast to existing conceptual models in acculturation literature that are often devoted to studying long-term settlers such as migrants or refugees in English-speaking countries (Smith & Khawaja, 2011), this study develops and tests a fine-grained model for degree-seeking mobile students. A mix-method was employed: a large scale survey (n = 619) across six Hong Kong universities and focus group interviews (n = 31). Bilingual competences were found to play important roles to predict socio-cultural adaptation together with academic efficacy, social support, contacts with locals and psychological adaptation. This study offered practical and managerial insights for educational policymakers, university senior management and administrations, academicians and research communities on how to manage the changes and accommodate the needs of international students so that we can attract a culturally diverse body of students. This research is significant because it extends the literature by examining socio-cultural adjustment during cross-cultural transitions in an increasingly globalized context. Copyright © 2018 HKERA International Conference.