Empirical studies on university choice and access among under-represented racial/ethnic minorities have utilised the concept of school-based social capital (SBSC)–defined by Stanton-Salazar as key resources and support provided by institutional agents (i.e. teachers, counsellors and other staff). They primarily relied upon minority students’ perceptions. Few of them canvassed both staff and student understandings and experiences of SBSC and thus have not yet captured the nature of SBSC and its influence from both the supply and demand sides. This study interviewed 18 secondary school teachers and nine minority students of South/Southeast Asian ethnicity enrolled in a publicly-funded school of Hong Kong. Its findings shed light on the highly-valued school-based support and resources staff and students viewed as helpful in the university choice process. The findings also disclosed the challenges minority students expressed about being exposed to SBSC while living in the school community, characterised by an ethos of “treating everybody the same”. This in turn rationalised staff understanding of diversity and equity-based support as a transitional approach to mainstreaming/assimilating minority students. As a result, some staff members either withheld critical information on university admission requirements or were less responsive towards the needs of the most disadvantaged minority students, despite a presumable promise to envision university for all. This study calls for structural and institutional transformation so that both individual and collective efforts can empower the least advantaged and promote their university choice and access. Copyright © 2023 Educational Review.

Despite national policies, de facto school segregation for racial/ethnic minority students in the West and East has continued to deepen. In Hong Kong, the segregated school system was abolished in 2013, while from 2004 reformed School Places Allocation Systems encouraged minority students to choose mainstream primary and secondary schools. However, de facto ethnicity-based school segregation continues to prevail. Most minority students in the mainstream system are stuck in low-status schools where they face discrimination and institutional exclusion. This has led many of them to retreat to a limited number of schools that have traditionally catered for minority communities. Such segregation calls forth scholarly attention to the paradoxical correlation between the physical mixing of diverse students and equality of educational opportunity, especially equal access to post-secondary education (PSE)—a key for minority youth to function in the competitive labour market. This study employed the theory of school-based social capital (SBSC) and compared the ways in which PSE-relevant institutional resources and support were rationalised and enacted by staff in de facto segregated and desegregated school contexts. Case studies of two secondary schools lead us to argue that desegregation is only effective when institutional structure, culture and agents empower minority students through access to instrumental resources and support for the pursuit of PSE. The findings confound the desegregation policy and call for structural/institutional interventions to ensure instrumental SBSC is accessible to PSE-bound minority students in all schools, and thus increase the effectiveness of school desegregation. Copyright © 2023 British Educational Research Association.

For the past two decades, a significant number of ethnic minority students from diverse racial, cultural, linguistic, and religious backgrounds have entered Chinese language classrooms in Hong Kong for the first time. Simultaneously, Chinese language teachers have come under criticism for their lack of understanding of diversity and their failure to integrate ethnic minority students academically and socially. However, there is little research on how these teachers can transform their educational beliefs, teaching techniques, and attitudes toward diversity and inclusion to respond effectively to the drastic changes taking place in their professional work. This study examines how a group of Chinese language teachers employed translanguaging as a social justice strategy to address the challenges of teaching minority students in a monolingual and assimilative educational setting in Hong Kong. Classroom observations show that teachers enacted a translanguaging stance, using students' familiar semiotic resources to make their teaching more inclusive and equitable for ethnic minority students from low socioeconomic and religious backgrounds. Teachers reported becoming more aware of diversity in the classroom as well as of the social inequalities and racial discrimination outside of school. The study shows that criticism has been unfairly levied on Chinese language teachers in Hong Kong, who should not be held responsible for the social problems hindering ethnic minorities' social mobility. Research should include a decolonial perspective to legitimize translanguaging as a social justice strategy for more transformative praxis in the education sector in postcolonial Hong Kong. Copyright © 2022 Springer.

This paper presents a systematic review of research on Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) education for ethnic minority students in Hong Kong SAR. Using three databases and screening with specific inclusion and exclusion criteria, the study selected 38 empirical studies published in English-language peer-reviewed journals. We find that there has been a surge of publications in Hong Kong in the past decade (2010–2020), and they are mostly authored by scholars from three universities in Hong Kong. Most of the research took a phenomenological approach, using interviews as the main data collection method and focusing on underprivileged South Asian students in secondary schools. The thematic analysis showed that Hong Kong’s CSL adopted a poststructuralist paradigm for understanding and revealing social inequalities surrounding Chinese language education for ethnic minority students. The study concludes that Hong Kong must decolonise its education system to genuinely support ethnic minority students to achieve educational equality and social justice. Copyright © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH.

This study examined the relations between majority/minority group membership and cross-cultural acceptance, and their linkage to school adjustment. A total of 2,016 students (ethnic minority [EM]: 51%; boys: 50%) at Grades 2, 5, 8, and 11 from 15 schools in Hong Kong participated in the study. These schools were either of low (below 30%) or high EM concentrations (over 70%). EM students at low-EM-concentration schools and Chinese students at high-EM-concentration schools both belonged to the minority groups in their respective schools. Moderated mediation analyses showed that being the numerical minority in school predicted higher school engagement and more positive affect. The associations between numerical group membership and adjustment outcomes were each mediated by the intention to accept outgroup members. In other words, higher cross-cultural acceptance was found among students who were themselves the minority in school, and stronger outgroup acceptance, in turn, predicted better adjustment. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s).

This presentation explores acculturation and identity of ethnic minority students in Hong Kong schools, and how they are associated to their learning needs in schools and to what extend culturally responsive classroom environment has been created for fulfilling their diverse learning and cultural needs. This study was qualitative in nature. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in three secondary schools where large numbers of ethnic minority students from low socio-economic backgrounds were enrolled. With school permission, thirty-two teachers were invited to attend one-on-one interviews. Eighteen were female and 14 were male. The enrolment of ethnic minority students was regarded by the teachers as one of the key factors which made the classroom more diverse and multicultural, with the range of diversity covering race, culture, religion, customs and socioeconomic background. When fulfilling their students’ needs, the teachers struggled with conceptualizing a new rationale for cultural responsiveness to diversity, developing intercultural sensitivity, promoting cultural responsiveness among the students, strengthening the home-school collaboration and broadening ethnic minority students’ aspirations for their education and careers. Copyright © 2019 CiCea.

Purpose: A growing body of research has focused on the topic of inclusive education for ethnic minorities in Hong Kong. At the same time, few scholars have explored the role technology can play in enhancing inclusivity within the context of quality education. This study examines how the differentiated use of technology that takes into account disparities in prior knowledge can benefit students of different learning backgrounds.Design/Approach/Methods: This study adopted an experimental design to investigate how content-specific and content-neutral technologies can be strategically used to support the classroom discussions of Chinese and ethnic minority students' learning Chinese language and mathematics. One hundred and twenty-one secondary school students participated in the study. Each student was randomly assigned to a condition, in a 2 (ethnicity: Chinese vs. ethnic minority) × 2 (content: content-specific first vs. content-neutral first) design.Findings: The study found that (a) for Chinese language lessons, ethnic minority students preferred to learn with content-neutral and content-specific technologies in prediscussion and postdiscussion activities, respectively; whereas the Chinese students' preferences were the opposite and (b) for mathematics lessons, both groups of students performed better when content-specific and content-neutral technologies were used in prediscussion and postdiscussion activities, respectively.Originality/Value: The study presents five practical suggestions for the strategic use of technology in inclusive classrooms in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s).

This article examines how schools in Hong Kong attempt to craft South Asian migrant students into desirable citizens and how the youths understand themselves as members of Hong Kong and of a global community. The contestation has to do both with how South Asians are viewed in Hong Kong and with how post-colonial Hong Kong is related to China. The process of citizen-making of transnational youths, I argue, is best understood at the local-national-global intersection.
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This article illustrates the interface of ethnic identities and a multi-ethnic learning environment in a predominantly Chinese society. Hong Kong – whilst reputed as an Asian international city – has displayed reticence in promoting multicultural initiatives and inclusiveness at a policy level. In this context, this study draws on a sociocultural perspective and interviews with a group of ethnic minority Filipino secondary school students. The interview data point to juxtapositions of ethnic identities with reference to students’ interactions with peers from same and different ethnic groups, ethnic in-group practices, and a schooling discourse that reflects Chinese language expectations and recognition of cultural diversity. The analysis, as a result, specifies how schooling experiences in this case become grounds for identity tensions in being a Filipino and a Hong Kong person. These tensions caution against tacit sociocultural relations in learning environments resulting from school-initiated multicultural practices without broader and explicit policy support for culturally diverse student population. Copyright © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Much of the existing literature on social capital and university choice processes postulates that family networks of underrepresented students from poor and minority backgrounds are disadvantaged in university resources and in turn deficit in social capital returns. The literature implies that school-based networks are essential to fill the university information voids at home. Less research, however, poses questions about whether the university resources occupied by school personnel are automatically available to less-privileged minority youths. To grasp the dynamic interplay between ethnicity, class and school-based social capital, this study drew on Lin's conceptualisation of homophilous and heterophilous social networking and explored the university choice and application processes among poor and working-class South/Southeast Asian minority students in Hong Kong. The participants' accounts uncovered the restrictions of school networks on norms, expectations and accessibility of information sources. The research results raise concerns about how to activate both homophilous and heterophilous ties for minority youths' widening access to higher education.
[Copyright © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.]