ABSTRACT
In this section, the chapter authors discuss educational experiences of ethnic minority students from three Asian tiger societies: Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. The chapters cover both policies and everyday classroom practices in relation to educational responses towards the ethnic diversity in these societies. Indeed, ethnic diversity in Asian societies is a growing phenomenon. While most western multicultural countries are traditionally recipients of a major influx of immigrants, and it is by these means that they become multicultural, the scenario in these three Asian societies is somewhat different. For example, in Taiwan and Korea the minority population is growing mostly because of cross-border marriage, whereas Hong Kong’s ethnic diversity is a mixture of voluntary or involuntary colonized migrants, foreign domestic workers and refugees or asylum seekers. Multiculturalism, therefore, takes a different shape in Asian societies, and this conceptualization is important to understand these societies’ multicultural education policies and practices (Bhowmik & Kennedy, 2016; Kennedy & Hue, 2011). Thus the purpose of the chapters in this section is to highlight such understandings nested in these unique contexts through educational experiences of the ethnic minority students.
