Empowerment from what? Teacher ‘citizenship talk’ practices for migrant children in China

ABSTRACT

Drawing on two multi-site ethnographic projects in Beijing and Shanghai, we explore how teachers in both public schools and schools for migrant children have responded to state policies that restrict educational opportunities for migrant students. We argue the importance of political context in re-conceptualising empowerment by raising the question ‘empowerment from what?’ By making explicit what is normalised, we problematise the ways in which the predominant definition of empowerment has marginalised and trivialised the experiences of educators who are also engaging in powerful acts of empowerment in China. Importantly, this study sheds light on the ways in which Chinese teachers use ‘citizenship talk’ practices to engage in empowerment processes for migrant students. We contend that the value of this piece lies in pushing critical scholars to think more deeply about empowerment as socio-cultural transformation and advancing the field by generating debate on how context matters.

借助北京和上海多个调研地点的民族志研究项目，我们探讨公立学校与打工子弟学校教师如何应对旨在限制流动儿童教育机会的国家政策。通过提出 “从何处赋权？”这一问题，我们论证政治背景在重新理解赋权方面的重要性。通过明确何为规范，我们对主流的赋权定义提出质疑，这一定义将那些在中国同样从事于有力的赋权活动的教育者的经验边缘化及琐碎化。重要的是，这项研究揭示中国的教师如何通过开展“公民话语 ”实践,参与对流动儿童赋权的过程。我们认为，本文的价值在于促使从事批判性研究的学者更深入地思考作为社会文化转化的赋权议题，并通过引发关于背景之重要性的讨论，推动这一研究领域的进展。

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant students
• empowerment
• critical theory
• citizenship talk
• China

关键词::

• 流动学生
• 赋权
• 批判理论
• 公民话语
• 中国

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and members of the editorial board for their insightful comments and suggestions, which have helped to clarify the article's argument. We are grateful to Bill Tsang, Anita Koo, Christopher B. Crowley, Li-Ching Ho, and Keith Barton for their constructive critique of earlier versions of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The Chinese term describing the schools for migrant children is dagong zidi xuexiao. There are various translations of this term in English, such as ‘schools for migrant children’, ‘migrant schools’, or ‘migrant children schools’. We use the translation Kwong first adopted in her 2004 China Quarterly publication, which is ‘migrant children schools’. This translation is well-established within the relevant English-language research literature, see for example, Wang and Holland (2011).

2 The hukou system, which divides China’s population into rural and urban hukou holders, reproduces disempowerment from rural status in the structural, economic, political, and socio-cultural spheres, especially for the migrant children with rural hukou who are born in or migrate to the cities (Chan 2019; Zhang and Wang 2010). The persistence of the hukou system today ensures this vulnerable population cannot fully integrate into the cities because of hukou restrictions on urban education and employment (Andreas and Zhan 2016; Chan and Zhang 1999).

3 The term suzhi (personal quality) encompasses an individual’s educational level, ideological and moral quality, communication and cooperation ability, aesthetic ability, and awareness of rules, etc. (Hansen and Woronov 2013; Woronov 2008).

4 Implicit in our argument is that the Chinese state plays a strong role in shaping teacher thought and behaviour to conform to state directives. However, rather than the state ‘controlling’ or teachers ‘internalising’ state-derived teaching norms, we draw on studies that assert teachers tend to be more compliant to the government’s commands because they were given less autonomy and independence in exercising their professional judgment (Zhao 2014). While the Chinese state sought to ‘professionalise’ teaching during the reform period in which our data was collected, the teaching profession never had the autonomy to develop and mature like it has historically in other contexts, such as in Western nations where schools serve as civil society institutions. In fact, ‘teachers in the Chinese Mainland were urged to strictly follow the state’s long existing commands. Thus, their professionalism could be interpreted as state-directed professionalism’ (Lai and Lo 2007, 65). This trend has only intensified during the current Chinese political regime.

5 All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Yiu

Lisa Yiu is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate School of Education, Stanford University. Her research seeks to advance educational equity through investigating diversity and inclusion issues for immigrant-origin youth in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Her work, which received the 2021 Bereday Award for Best Article in Comparative Education Review, is motivated and critically enriched by her experiences as an inner-city teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District and supervisor in the Stanford Teacher Education Program.

Min Yu

Min Yu is an Associate Professor in the College of Education at Wayne State University. Her research explores the relationships between home, school, and community with attention to different forms of power. She is the author of the book The Politics, Practices, and Possibilities of Migrant Children Schools in Contemporary China (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) and her work appears in journals such as The China Quarterly, Comparative Education Review, Review of Research in Education, Educational Studies, Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education.