![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article reports the findings of a sociolinguistic ethnographic inquiry into the constructions of internal rural-to-urban migrant students by one urban public school in China, and how these students positioned themselves to these constructions against the background of the school’s neoliberal transformation. This inquiry finds that, due to the case school’s pursuit of exam-performance-based academic excellence, its official documents discursively constructed migrant students as being of “low quality,” and a problem for and potential danger to the school. However, the daily positioning practices of school administrators, teachers, and these students did not just reproduce this uniformly negative discursive construction; rather, they contested it in a complex and contradictory manner. This article offers further evidence showing the complexity of identity constructions in late modern urban schools, wherein professionals and students are all involved in a marketized education context that brings crises and dilemmas to institutions.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the previous versions of the paper and for their critical comments that have helped with the revisions. Needless to say, any possible remaining fallacy is my own fault.
Funding
The completion of this paper is supported by the Key Research Projects of Philosophy and Social Science of the Ministry of Education of China (grant number: 15JZD048).
Notes
1. Names of the school and participants in this article are fictitious.
2. In mainland China, most students who go to Internet cafes go there to play computer games. Students who frequent Internet cafes are often labelled “bad” students who waste their time there and do not care about their studies.