Complexities of Shared Ethnicity, Immigrant Education, and Disabilities: Reconceptualizing Multicultural Special Education

Y

27

Immigrants; Ethnicity; Special Education; Cultural Differences; English (Second Language); Second Language Learning; Asians; Language Proficiency; Foreign Countries; Disabilities; Cultural Pluralism; Language of Instruction; Teaching Methods; Educational Policy; Teacher Education; Identification; Multilingualism; Inclusion; Interviews; Observation; Diaries; Teacher Attitudes; Special Education Teachers; Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder; Dialects; Chinese; Sino Tibetan Languages

0827-3383

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.

As Provided

74

2016

EJ1120697