Teachers’ beliefs of behaviors, learning, and teaching related to minority students: a comparison of Han and Mongolian Chinese teachers

Abstract

Teachers from mainstream and minority backgrounds teaching in the same school contexts presumably hold different beliefs of learning and teaching about minority students due to their unique prior life and ethnic experiences. Teachers in similar school environments are also assumed to share beliefs of teaching and learning about their students because of the influences of their similar school contexts despite their different prior life and ethnic experiences. This study examines the two contentious assumptions by surveying the beliefs of behavior, learning, and teaching that the mainstream Han and minority Mongolian Chinese teachers in the same school contexts hold about their Mongolian Chinese students. It found that the two groups agreed that teachers’ inadequate planning and management were the major sources of their students’ behavior problems while students’ home backgrounds, abilities, and efforts explained their learning failure or success. Both believed that students’ emotional and social problems were more important than their learning problems for them to attend to, and their expertise in helping students develop self-worth was more important than their expertise in curriculum and pedagogy. Both preferred to vary teaching standards, content, and methods to accommodate students’ differences and offer opportunities for students to discover things themselves.

Keywords:

• teacher beliefs
• ethnic backgrounds
• Chinese school contexts

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the anonymous faculty members and doctoral students at Minzu University for helping conducting the survey and inputting the survey results into the database. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous teachers in the Inner Mongolian for sharing their responses to the survey of the study. Our thanks also go to Drs. Qingmin Shi and Qiang Cheng for their assistance with Chi-square tests using SPSS in the study.