Teaching Diversity or Exclusion?: Education, Language, and the Boundaries of ‘Local’ in Hong Kong

Abstract

Amid sociolinguistics’ ongoing interest in negotiations of the “global” and “local,” discourses of multiculturalism and diversity remain an important site of investigation into the ways that individuals are categorized and linked to competing visions of local identity. In Hong Kong, language is a key indicator used to differentiate groupings such as “mainland Chinese,” “working-class South Asians” and upper/middle class “expatriates” along class and racialized lines. At the same time, a rising discourse of “localism” makes questions of “local” authenticity and belonging increasingly salient and fraught. Our paper combines theoretical perspectives from education (Lee, 2008; Banks, 2017) and language ideology (Irvine and Gal 2000) to consider how “diversity” and “local” authenticity are constructed and contested at different scales, drawing on ethnographic data from a Hong Kong secondary school, analysis of Hong Kong policy and media, and close analysis of the curriculum for Liberal Studies, a subject in Hong Kong education which is focused on social explorations of the world and includes multiculturalism as one of its aims. Liberal Studies represents a particularly contested site as it has been blamed by policy makers and politicians in the local arena for encouraging youth rebelliousness which was seen to culminate in the Umbrella Movement/Occupy Central with Peace and Love movement in 2014. However, our analysis argues that its representation of homogenized and bounded social groupings aligns closely with dominant and conservative forces in Hong Kong society, reflecting latent social values of elite members of society that are permissive toward prejudice and discrimination based on such factors as race, ethnicity, and culture. The ethnographic data highlights how individuals within the school position themselves and are positioned by others within this system. We conclude that both the formal and ‘hidden’ curriculum of education in Hong Kong echoes and affirms exclusionary attitudes that can be found in the society at large toward those cast as ‘non-local’ due to race, ethnicity, and class, instead of multicultural aims toward greater social justice, equity, and tolerance.