Ethnic minority cultures in Chinese schooling: manifestations, implementation pathways and teachers’ practices

ABSTRACT

In response to the decline of ethnic minority cultures in the past four decades, the Chinese government implemented measures to introduce cultural content into school practices in order to preserve minority heritage. Based on an empirical study in two ethnic minority areas with different degrees of assimilation into mainstream Han culture, this article investigates manifestations of ethnic minority cultures and teachers’ practices in education. Drawing on the concept of internal orientalism and approaches to multicultural curriculum reform, it argues that the superficiality of how ethnic minority cultures manifest in schools can be explained by deeply ingrained internal orientalism, in which ethnic minority cultures are essentialised as static cultural artefacts. Due to the highly centralised nature of educational governance, teachers’ practices in implementing ethnic minority cultures are, at best, of an additive nature, and leave the fundamental structure and objectives of the curriculum unaltered.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnic minority culture
• school education
• internal orientalism
• multicultural curriculum reform
• china

Geolocation information

China

Note on the contributor

Wei Wang obtained his doctoral degree from Lund University, Sweden in 2019. At present, he works as assistant professor at Hunan Normal University in China. His research interests include sociology of multiculturalism, intercultural education, ethnic minority education and teacher education.

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Barbara Schulte, Glen Helmstad, Mina O’ Dowd and Fred Dervin for comments on versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China (Educational Science) [grant number #CAA210232]