Teachers’ work under responsibilising policies: an analysis of educators’ views on China’s 2021 educational reforms

ABSTRACT

This article offers unique insights into the relationship between education policy and teachers’ work. It considers how globally pervasive responsibilising regimes make teachers’ work more burdensome. Drawing on interviews with 15 school teachers, this article shows how China’s 2021 Double Burden Reduction Policy has reconfigured educators’ (class)work practices and pedagogical approaches. Specifically, it unpacks the policy mechanisms that: 1) condense school time and make teachers’ work more methodical and 2) prolong teachers' working hours that are dedicated to offering students after-school educational support, thus reducing the demand for shadow education. This article argues that this policy shifts the education burden away from tutorial enterprises and parents and onto the teachers, which illustrates a case of the impact of policy regimes on teachers’ work within the broader context of neoliberal globalisation. Moreover, this article produces a novel typological spectrum – submission, substantiation, and scepticism – to capture and understand the diverse ways in which teachers may respond to policy-led changes to their professional work globally. Overall, it generates new knowledge on the impact of homogenising education policies on teachers’ work and the heterogeneity of teachers’ responses to these policies, thus contributing conceptually to the wider field of policy sociology in education.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• teachers’ burden
• education policy
• teachers’ work
• shadow education
• double burden reduction policy

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our research participants, who gave up their time to participate in our study during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the reviewers for critically yet constructively engaging with our manuscript and for providing useful feedback.

Author contributions

Our contributions to this article were as follows: Achala Gupta (lead author, data analysis, and writing) and Xi Zhao (data collection and transcription).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics statement

A favourable ethical opinion was secured from the University of Southampton’s Ethics Committee: reference 66601.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Achala Gupta

Achala Gupta is a lecturer at the Southampton Education School, University of Southampton. Her research focuses on investigating educational issues sociologically. Achala has contributed to the literature on comparative and international education through her research about education delivery systems (formal and supplementary) and schooling practices in Asia, and students’ aspirations and transition within higher education in Europe. She has published articles on the heterogeneity of middle-class (dis)advantage, teacher-entrepreneurialism, social legitimacy and the organisational arrangements of private tutoring in India, as well as on how students are made sense of by policymakers, staff, the media and students themselves in Denmark, England, Germany, Ireland, Poland, and Spain.

Xi Zhao

Xi Zhao is a postgraduate student at the Southampton Education School, University of Southampton. Her research is centred around the influence of policy on private education in China. She employs qualitative methods in her research and has provided valuable perspectives and findings to the existing literature on the subject.