Preparing Culturally Responsive Han Teachers: Case Study of a Teacher Education Program in China

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teaching and teacher education (TETP) round-table 2

Proposal

The People’s Republic of China is a multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural country, governed by a single party government led by the Communist Party (Leibold & Chen, 2014). China is also the world’s most diverse country represented by 56 different ethnic groups. Along with the social transformation and urbanization processes, the number of minorities has been increasing, especially in metropolitan cities, since the Chinese government started enabling the migration of people for both economic development and the improvement of individual living standards (Iredale, Bilik, & Guo, 2003). Despie the central government’s concerns, ethnic minorities are often linked to biased cultural representation and stereotypical images in mainstream society (Wang, 2015). Many from the ethnic majority group, called “Han”, still hold deficit attitudes toward non-Han groups and “label them as barbarians” (Zhao, 2007, p.4). This historically rooted stereotype has negative influences on the cultural representations and educational experiences of minorities in mainstream society, whereas the ethnic majority Han culture is represented as valued, modern, and normal. The influx of migrant ethnic minority students and the increasing number of second-generation ethnic minorities in urban areas create challenges for majority Han teachers who are used to having only Han students in their classrooms.

This societal context necessitates an examination about how Han teachers are prepared to handle the changing demographic reality of their classrooms. This qualitative case study was designed to explore preservice Han teachers’ perspectives of, and academic preparation in, multicultural education in order to enhance institutional quality and effectively prepare culturally responsive Han teachers for multicultural and multiethnic students in China. Guided by theories of Culturally Responsive Teaching (Gay, 2018) and Multicultural Teacher Education (Cohen & Lotan, 2014), this qualitative case study included documents, two rounds of semi-structured interviews, and focus groups in a selected teacher education program in Beijing, People’s Republic of China. Five teacher candidates and three teacher educators were selected in the research. All teacher candidates were in the fourth year of college studies and all participants had experiences working with ethnic minority students, from volunteer teaching programs in ethnic minority regions to student teaching practicums at placement schools with ethnically and culturally diverse student populations.
This case study exploration revealed four critical themes: Teacher candidates had ambiguous perceptions of diversity; their teaching preparation for diverse students was inadequate; the candidates experienced disparity between their academic preparation and teaching practice; and the teacher education program lacked commitment to preparing teachers for diversity. Very few studies on Chinese multicultural teacher education have been conducted from Han perspectives. This study points out the importance of preparing cultural and ethnic majority (Han) teachers to acquire multicultural knowledge and cross-cultural teaching competence for improving ethnically diverse, rural, migrant, and globalizing education in China.

Author

• Huanshu Yuan, Texas A&M University