Supplying private tuition: edu-business and Asian migration in Australia

ABSTRACT

This article reports a study of the supply of private supplementary tuition in literacy for primary school students. The data set consisted of websites and advertisements of 46 suppliers active in an area of suburban Australia with a substantial population of migrants from East Asia. To conceptualise the supply of private tuition as edu-business, the study articulated sociological understandings of pedagogy with principles of economic sociology. Qualitative field analysis identified three types of product (schoolwork help, school-like programmes, school-relevant courses), and differences in the ways personal tutors and tuition organisations marshalled and mobilised capital in pursuit of profit through these. Conclusions are drawn about the utility of the concept of field for research on private tuition.

KEYWORDS:

• Shadow education
• private tutoring
• supplementary education
• Bourdieu
• Asian migration
• edu-business
• entrepreneur

Acknowledgement

The data used in this article were produced by the project, Private literacy tutoring: A sociology of shadow education. The authors thank Catherine Doherty and Elizabeth Briant for their collaborative work. They also thank participants in a symposium at the 2016 conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) for feedback on an earlier version. We thank the anonymous Discourse reviewers for their most helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Karen Dooley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5826-3415

Liwei Livia Liu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5025-2722

Yue Melody Yin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1269-6565

Notes

1 We foreground the states in which Australian research has been undertaken on the assumption that differences in state education systems may bear on supply of and demand for private tuition.

2 Two of the researchers are highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals and one a less proficient English-Chinese bilingual. All have experience as students in both Chinese and Australian education systems, and various configurations of experience as teachers and researchers in the two systems.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) under grant number DP160100848.