Cultural difference characterizes many parts of the global society. Against this backdrop, teacher education plays a role in ensuring that the teaching profession has the capacity to address social justice issues arising from the increasing representation of minoritized learners in schools (Delano-Oriaran, 2016). The move to engaging cultural diversity in education is not confined to immigrant-receiving societies in Europe. This is particularly evident in a newly introduced measure of ‘Global Competence’, a measure that, amongst other things,  looks at societies’ responses to cultural diversity (OECD, 2018). Hong Kong was ranked highly in this measure, although the local authority noted that “more work could be done to improve [its] students' perspectives in appreciating different cultures and their adaptability to multicultural environments” (HKSAR Government, 2020, October 22, para. 6).

This paper considers the case of Hong Kong, a former British colony with 584,383 of non-ethnically Chinese people, commonly known as ethnic minorities. In 2016, 38,075 ethnic minorities aged under 15 were represented in Hong Kong’s educational institutions. The purpose of the paper is   to situate multi/intercultural scholarship globally in order to engage with social justice challenges in schools. It aims to  provide   possibilities   for building action strategies that draw on genuine and culturally plural dialogues between the East and West (Shi-xu, 2009).

Hong Kong has not made    that addressing cultural diversity issues in classrooms a policy priority. This is partly due to the lack of multi/intercultural frameworks (Yeung, 2012) and racial segregation effects of school enrolment practices in Hong Kong (Shum, Gao, & Ki, 2016). Aside from a commitment to providing stronger Chinese language support and racial integration measures (Education Bureau, 2013), there appears a need to focus on the role of teacher education and how it might attend to issues of diversity and inclusion more proactively (Chan & Lo, 2017).

This paper proposes that teacher education may benefit from mobilizing the wider knowledge base of communities (Peele-Eady & Moje, 2020) to address entrenched inequities impacting upon minoritized learners. It presents a framework that identifies key collaboration directions for teacher education and the civil society to address social justice challenges in a context where cultural diversity is acknowledged in limited ways. The purpose of which is neither to adopt the framework uncritically nor ignore existing collaborative work between universities and communities, but to explore an approach that foregrounds questions of educational equity to reflect Hong Kong’s increasingly diverse classrooms. The paper addresses two research questions:

1. What might be the role of teacher education through community engagement in developing understandings on cultural sensitivity in a society in which diversity is not a norm? 
2. What are the potential modes of practice of teacher education for supporting equity and inclusion through collaborating with the civil society?

This paper is grounded in a sociocultural perspective that acknowledges the role of teacher education in enabling “teachers to use a dynamic array of knowledge and to learn in and from practice” (McDonald, 2005, p. 420). This perspective posits that the ways in which learners, teachers and institutions are positioned in a society, including the types of available resources and other contextual factors, “matter to the work of teaching and learning” (McDonald, 2005, p. 421). The attention to the wider cultural context of teacher education (e.g., various expressions of culture and negotiation of multiple perspectives) underpins the collaboration between universities and communities in addressing diversity issues.

The analysis addressing RQ1 employs an integrative review to synthesize the literature in ways that generate new theoretical perspectives (Snyder, 2019; Torraco, 2005). It does so by combining “perspectives and insights from different fields” to create a theoretical foundation for a topic under study (Snyder, 2019, p. 336). A series of search was performed on social sciences and education databases (e.g., JSTOR, ProQuest) to identify pertinent peer-reviewed books, chapters and articles by using the key words such as “community engaged scholarship” and “community engagement” and “engaged scholarship”. The abstracts were reviewed for its relevance to the role of community in scholarship and vice versa. RQ2 was addressed by means of a review of the tenets and definitions of community engaged scholarship. The identified literature was subjected to a critical analysis to identify missing components and elements of community engaged scholarship that are underrepresented in research. The purpose of which is to map out a research agenda drawing on literature reviews of “phenomena for which accepted models and frameworks do not yet exist” (Torraco, 2005, p. 363). Publications within 10 years that defined community engaged scholarship and a framework, such as the function of scholars and mode of collaboration between faculties and community partners, were reviewed and discussed to develop the arguments for this paper.

Teacher education may benefit from community-engaged scholarship that lays out clearer collaborative roles in engaging with diversity work. Community-engaged scholarship refers to “partnerships between academic and non-academic practitioners… to collaboratively produce insights for addressing problems” (Garner & Barnes, 2013, p. 107). The work of Beaulieu, Breton, and Brousselle (2018) provides a basis to extend this view to teacher education. The bi-directional arrows highlight the reciprocity among each component as illustrated in Figure 1. The roles of a teacher education provider are: (i) to initiate a platform for dialogues in which community members can express and exchange their views with the university (e.g., community consultation, research seminars) and; (ii) to identify community needs from these to generate more robust knowledge bases through scholarship (e.g., curriculum audit, interviews with academic staff, pre- and in-service teachers, producing academic publications). These knowledge bases are fed back to the community through informal and structured learning programs, activities and research seminars. As a mode of practice, the interfaces of scholarship, community engagement and learning and teaching are boundary-crossing because understanding community issues involves eliciting perspectives from researchers and practitioners to drive community improvement (Nelson, London, & Strobel, 2015). The collaboration supports the involvement of all parties to shed light on deep-seated issues on cultural diversity, race and ethnicity engendered by the effects of the dominant discourse (Barinaga & Parker, 2013) that normalize inequities facing minoritized learners. This outcome is signified by the larger box in the center to specify the community standards on cultural sensitivity for teacher education. The circle represents the democratization of knowledge that supports the need to produce and present knowledge in equitable ways. Working out what requires to be culturally sensitive classrooms involves dialogue and collaboration with civil societies working with minoritized communities in promoting the common good (Beaulieu et al., 2018).

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