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.
[Copyright of Educational Studies is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03055690903425383]

Hong Kong secondary schools have difficulty in integrating guidance, or counselling, and discipline into schooling. In some schools, discipline is overdeveloped while guidance is underdeveloped. The positive aspect of the caring system is distorted as part of the provision of discipline. This article looks at the distinction between guidance and discipline, and deals with what relatively little is known about in current research, that is, how guidance and discipline function within a school organization. It uses the perspectives of interactionism and social constructionism to contrast the relationship between guidance and discipline in two Hong Kong secondary schools. It employs case study and qualitative methods for data collection. Data for the two schools show that the contextual and organizational factors have a profound impact on the connectedness between guidance and discipline at the three levels of whole school, department and classroom. Finally, the implications for their implementation and integration will be given.
[Copyright of Educational Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131910701427355]

Discipline is a crucial aspect of teachers' and students' classroom lives. Hong Kong secondary teachers, as elsewhere, are concerned with students' misbehaviour. This article examines teachers' constructs of classroom discipline and strategies adopted for behaviour management. Qualitative data were collected by interviews and classroom observation. Sixty teachers were involved. Eighteen classrooms were observed. The influence of the three schools of classic Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism, emerged as a main theme from the data. It was prominent as their key principles were incorporated into the teachers' personal system of classroom discipline. The findings illuminate the influence of Chinese culture in Hong Kong classrooms. Implications for the promotion of culturally responsive classrooms and the development of educational policies on pastoral care are drawn.
[Copyright of Pastoral Care in Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0122.2007.00406.x]

School guidance seeks to promote the whole person growth of students. It is regarded as an integral part of an educational programme. In Hong Kong secondary schools, a team of teachers are responsible for school guidance. This article examines how guidance teachers made sense of their caring work in general and specifically the counselling services they offered to students. With the use of a narrative analysis and personal experience methods, the study explores the experience of guidance teachers in counselling. Twelve in-service teachers who had enrolled in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education programme at the Hong Kong Institute of Education were interviewed. The influence of the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, emerging as a theme from the data, was prominent, as its key principles were incorporated into the teachers' personal systems of counselling. The findings illuminate the influence of Chinese culture in Hong Kong schools. Implications for the promotion of culturally responsive approaches to counselling and culturally competent practices for helping are discussed.
[Copyright of British Journal of Guidance & Counselling is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03069880802088929]

Many schools in Hong Kong are concerned with the growing number of enrolments of students from Mainland China. This article examines the immigrant students' constructs of their cross-cultural identities. It reveals how these students experience a journey of transformation in language, culture and identity. Qualitative data were collected from unstructured interviews with 12 immigrant students from Mainland China from six secondary schools. Two cases which are representative of the sample are reported. The study showed the transformation of the cross-cultural identities of these students, in the process of which they adopted the new culture into their lives and made it their reality while they still strongly connected part of their identity to their Mainland Chinese background. Despite some negative experiences of adaptation, they adopted a meritocratic approach to making sense of their cross-cultural experience. It was used as a form of agency to overcome, or at least ameliorate, feelings of discrimination, loss of cultural support and being immigrants in the 'new' society of Hong Kong. Lastly, two implications for the promotion of education for immigrant students will be discussed at school and legal levels.
[Copyright of Ethnography and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17457820802305469]