Exploring pedagogic discourses of cultural responsiveness: a tale of two classrooms

ABSTRACT

International concerns about the educational equity of ethnic minorities have continued to highlight teachers’ abilities to be culturally responsive. How do teachers manage cultural diversity through their pedagogical practices in the absence of relevant teacher training? The answer to this question is essential as it may help move our understanding of diversity education forward in societies where ethnic diversity is not necessarily the norm. Drawing from observational data in a Hong Kong multiethnic secondary school, this paper explores two teachers’ pedagogies. I interpreted the data using Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy to identify the nature of the class activities and instructional patterns about teacher control and pacing. These pedagogical practices, I suggest, emerged from power relations that reveal teachers’ efforts in recognising their students’ ethnic diversity while negotiating academic expectations on the students to excel in Hong Kong’s competitive examination system.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogic discourse
• cultural diversity
• ethnic minority
• Hong Kong

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the financial support of the University of Tasmania through the Tasmania Graduate Research Scholarship and Tuition Fee Scholarship, which enabled the data collection for this study. I also extend my gratitude to the school and teachers who collaborated with me on producing this study. I am also grateful for the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback and the editorial support of Pedagogy, Culture & Society on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the funding provided by the Tasmania Graduate Research Scholarship and Tuition Fee Scholarship from the University of Tasmania, Australia.