TITLE:
What Empowers Ethnic Minority Parents to Change towards Supporting Their Children’s Learning of Chinese in a Hong Kong Home-School-Community Project?
AUTHORS:
Shek-Kam Tse, Emily Yuen-Wah Pang, King-Wo Chow, Wing-Wah Ki, Wai-Ip Lam
KEYWORDS:
Parent Change, Parental Empowerment, Parental Participation, Ethnic Minority Children, Chinese Language Learning
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.9 No.5,
May
14,
2021
ABSTRACT: Recent
literature has emphasized the importance of parental involvement of immigrant
families in supporting their children’s education and learning advancement.
Support from parents spiritually and in terms of familial resources is
important in helping their children to overcome cultural differences and
learning demands. However, few studies systematically explore how the parents
can be empowered in the first place to provide such support. This paper attempts
to fill this research gap with findings from Hong Kong, a place where such
empowerment to migrants and ethnic minority parents has been badly needed. The
learning of Chinese is a great challenge for these parents and their children
for life, career and education. Yet, these parents often feel little hope that
they can support their children in going over the language hurdle. Chinese scripts are non-phonetic, and Chinese
speech is tonal. Few of the parents are themselves literate in Chinese. In view
of this, parental empowerment has been taken as one focus in a five-year
collaborative project “C-for-Chinese@JC” based on a
home-school-community model. In-depth interviews were conducted with twenty
ethnic minority parents upon open invitation in 2020. Six types of emergent
parent changes were identified through their participation in program activities.
Based on an analysis of the critical incidents associated with the changes, two
critical aspects were identified in the parental empowerment process, which
include: 1) Parents’ seeing their children making improvements in their Chinese
learning; 2) Parents’ seeing
themselves being able to play a part in the activities related to the learning
and expanding their own community social networks. The paper concludes with
suggestions for future research on parental empowerment and change, including
the need of synergetic inputs from NGOs, schools and universities under the
home-school-community (h-s-c) model.