This article draws insight from a narrative inquiry to examine the complexities of educating immigrant students with disabilities in which language, culture, and disability collide. Issues related to language-in-education policy, teacher preparation, and the proportion and identification of culturally and linguistically diverse students were primarily reviewed within multicultural and multilingual education conceptual frameworks in English speaking countries between English speaking teachers and non-English speaking students. Little is known about potentially more complicated situations such as those in which teachers and students have a shared ethnicity and dialects with different levels of proficiency. This article thus attempts to illustrate and map the complexity based on the insight from a narrative inquiry situated in an inclusive school setting of Hong Kong. Multiple sources of data were included for a thorough understanding of and analyses on the place, temporality, and sociality within the narrative inquiry framework. Data were drawn from interviews, classroom observations, teacher diaries, school data, and student input. Analyses indicated that shared ethnicity and languages could complicate rather than simplify the teaching and learning contexts. The lived experiences of the special educator demonstrated and contextualised the complex issues of educating CLD children with ADHD of shared ethnicity in multilingual environments. Findings of this inquiry added an important dimension to immigrant and multicultural special education studies and concluded that current inquiry paradigm should be expanded to include shared ethnicity and different proficiency in shared dialects/languages.

The academic underachievement of ethnic minorities, especially Pakistanis, in Hong Kong is well-recognized. This is stereotypically attributed to Islamic practices that are perceived to impede education, yet the voices of Pakistani parents and children are seldom heard. This research seeks to illuminate how Pakistani Muslim immigrant students and their parents understand the role of religion in education. The key finding highlights how both parents and students rate religion and education as highly important, and maintain that the two complement—rather than contradict—each other. They reject the public perception that Islam discourages the education of females, asserting that Islam upholds equality, including gender equality. Nonetheless, and maybe paradoxically, females interviewed during this research do encounter greater challenges than males in pursuing an education. In the young women's understanding, this comes from gendered cultural practices that are not necessarily endorsed by Islam. In response, both parents and daughters fight against, or conform to, these practices.
[Copyright of Asian Anthropology is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2015.1025592]