An Examination of Three Interventions for Enhancing Preservice Teachers’ Ethnocultural Empathy, Intercultural Competence, and Culturally Responsive Classroom Management Self-Efficacy in Hong Kong

Abstract

Prejudice and discrimination are challenging issues in the world today. Education plays a crucial role in developing the intercultural competence (ICC) of citizens in a society. However, studies have shown that teachers face many challenges in culturally diverse classrooms in Hong Kong. Teachers and preservice teachers need to be equipped with ICC and culturally responsive pedagogies to help build a more harmonious society. This study used a mixed-methods design to evaluate the impact of three online perspective-taking interventions to enhance teachers’ ethnocultural empathy, with the aim of improving their ICC and self-efficacy for culturally responsive classroom management. The study included a pretest survey, 4 weeks of online Zoom meetings (three meetings for perspective-taking interventions and one control activity), and a posttest survey. There were 90 participants initially enrolled in the study, including 89 preservice teachers and one in-service teacher from Hong Kong, but the in-service teacher was excluded from the analysis at a later stage due to incomplete data. The findings indicate that the interventions did help enhance the teachers’ ethnocultural empathy, ICC, and self-efficacy in providing culturally responsive classroom management. No significant differences were found among the three perspective-taking interventions based on the quantitative analysis, but the qualitative results suggest that different interventions helped the participants enhance their ICC in different ways. The findings shed light on the importance of having role models in teacher education for the development of teachers’ ICC. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the order of interventions can produce different outcomes. However, more studies are required to determine the impact of the order of interventions.

Date of Award	2 Apr 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Maria Tsapali (Supervisor) & Ioanna Palaiologou (Supervisor)