Research Highlighted:

Yiu, L. (2020). Educational Injustice in a High-Stakes Testing Context: A Mixed Methods Study on Rural Migrant Children’s Academic Experiences in Shanghai Public Schools. Comparative Education Review, 64(3), 498-524. https://doi.org/10.1086/709429

ABSTRACT 

This mixed method study analyzes rural migrant children’s academic experiences in two Shanghai public schools when 2012 PISA scores were administered. It contributes empirical evidence on how hukou status shapes educational inequality in contemporary China. Since rural migrants are ineligible for the high-stakes test for Shanghai’s senior secondary admission (zhongkao), teachers diverted resources towards urban children at the expense of rural migrants, regardless of academic potential. Such “successful” teaching practices to maximize ranking motivated excessive resource provision to the detriment of urban youth’s development. This article argues that it is only possible to understand these patterns through an inequality theory that explicitly considers the diminished integrity of teaching in high-stakes testing contexts. The framework explains educational injustices when the moral assumption of “good” teaching to benefit a child is no longer valid, with implications on the growing global emphasis on high-stakes testing.

BACKGROUND 

Rural migrant children’s education has emerged as one of the most pressing problems facing contemporary China.  Under the hukou system, a hereditary household registration system that determines Chinese citizens’ access to public services (e.g. education), these young people face educational barriers and may be at risk of developing into an urban underclass.  In response, Shanghai’s equity-focused reforms (2008-11) aimed to dissolve hukou barriers and increase educational opportunity by allowing migrant children to attend public schools for compulsory education. 

Examining rural migrant children’s academic experiences in Shanghai public schools during this reform period provides opportunity to examine hukou inequality in a high-stakes testing context.  In Shanghai, divergent municipal policies towards migrant children’s education intersect with high-stakes testing pressures to situate public schools in a dilemma:  enrolling rural migrant youth who are excluded from the high-stakes zhongkao that has grave school consequences. While Shanghai reforms entitle rural migrant children to access public schools for compulsory education, restrictive post-compulsory educational policies in the city exclude rural migrants from Shanghai’s zhongkao. Thus, schools have little incentive to academically invest in rural migrant children.  

Importantly, research typically overlooks the role of high-stakes testing on rural migrant children’s education in the city, despite the dominance of exam-oriented teaching in China’s education system.  The few exceptions suggest that high-stakes testing is a critical factor in rural migrant children’s inequitable, public school experiences.  This article examines how high stakes testing shapes youths’ academic experiences in two Shanghai middle schools, which enrolled urban and rural migrant youth, during the reforms. 

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

To examine the extent and ways in which educators provide rural and urban students different learning opportunities and environments within the same school, the predominant framework conceptualizes inequality in terms of ability-grouping, a practice of sorting students based on ability or prior performance into “tracks” to better meet students’ needs through a more homogeneous learning environment.  This inequality framework has two moral assumptions:  1) “good” teaching practices aim to benefit the child, 2) any tracking-induced achievement gap is unintentional because teaching is done to benefit the student.

However, the predominant framework does not explain the inequality patterns in the two investigated Shanghai schools, where a different inequality emerged in response to maximizing ranking. Drawing on sociological theories of public measures, I develop an alternative educational theory to explain how high-stakes testing pressures differentiate students’ academic experiences within the same school when the moral assumption of “good” teaching no longer holds.  In both Shanghai schools, “successful” teaching practices to maximize ranking and consequent resource allocation led to two educational injustices.  First, “successful” teaching  is a source of injustice when educators prioritize ranking above the well-being of all students–urban and rural migrant. Second, in response to ranking pressures, educators in both schools admitted contributing to a widening hukou-achievement gap by diverting resources towards urban youth who “counted” for Shanghai zhongkao, at the expense of rural migrant students who did “not count.” 

METHODS 

I conducted a mixed methods analysis of resource allocation, i.e., the decision-making process by which educators in two Shanghai schools invested instructional resources along hukou lines. School S segregated rural migrants into hukou-based homerooms, in which “urban” and “rural” homerooms were high and low track, respectively. Contrastly, School I sorted rural migrants into integrated homerooms, in which “high ability” and “low ability” were high and low track, respectively. 

FINDINGS

An exam-induced inequality 

In response to Shanghai zhongkao pressures, both schools differentiated students into two ranking-oriented categories: “those that counted” (urban) and “those that did not count” (rural migrants). 

Educational injustice against rural migrant children

In both schools, homeroom sorting patterns are not explained by the predominant inequality model of “good” teaching, which expects schools to sort high-achieving rural migrant students into appropriately challenging high-track homerooms to develop their academic potential. Rather, homeroom track placement revealed a puzzle: both schools sorted high-achieving rural migrant children into low-track homerooms. 

Due to zhongkao exclusion, educators in both schools intentionally prioritized the academic development of students who “counted” (urban youth), at the expense of high-achieving children who “didn’t count” (migrant youth).  Both schools thus de-prioritized the academic growth of high-achieving rural migrant students, despite high scores indicating academic potential. These students were sorted into low-track homerooms, which provided a lower quality learning climate compared to high-track homerooms.  For example, School I educators sought to “spur on” low-achieving urban youth through a learning climate positively influenced by high-achieving, migrant classmates. As educators in both schools used “successful” teacher practices to maximize ranking, they admitted homeroom sorting neglected migrant children’s academic needs.

Educational injustice against urban children 

While homeroom placement privileges urban students’ academic development compared with their rural migrant peers, both schools’ label of “those who count” overlooks “successful” teaching as a form of injustice to urban students.  In both schools, urban students received excessive amounts of instructional time in-between class periods and after school. The instructional purpose of providing additional classroom teaching was to establish urban youth’s strong academic foundation in grades 6-7 for the accelerated learning of grades 8 and 9. However, teachers invested in urban youth’s academic growth at the expense of non-academic development. Consequently, Shanghai urban youth expressed anxiety from test pressures and considered test scores to represent their value.  

IMPLICATIONS 

This paper has two significant implications for China’s policymakers, scholars, and educators.  First, findings contribute to our understanding of hukou inequality in contemporary China. In Shanghai’s high-stakes testing context, the hukou institution has become a school marker of whether to academically invest in a child.   Shanghai findings converge with global data to reveal an exam-induced inequality in high stakes testing contexts, where teachers systematically prioritize students whose academic development will increase school ranking.

Second, I problematize the predominant conception of “educational equity” for China’s rural migrant children. Policymakers and researchers generally define educational equity for China’s rural migrant children as equal access to “quality” education (e.g. public school); such a conception motivated the Shanghai reforms highlighted in this study. However, my findings reveal the distorted understanding of educational equity that arises when we assume that teaching practices are “good” in  high-stakes testing context. As Shanghai educators used “successful” teacher practices to maximize ranking, they excessively invested in urban students’ academic growth at the expense of non-academic development. The education that urban students receive should no longer be regarded as the educational equity model for rural migrant students. When maximizing ranking is the purpose of education, teaching itself constitutes a form of injustice to all students. I thus propose an “equity” re-conceptualization towards whole-child development and the re-centering of teaching on the child.

Author Bio

Lisa Yiu is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. Her equity-focused research applies critical and sociology theory to investigate diversity and inclusion issues for immigrant-origin youth in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.  Her work, which has been recognized by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, is motivated and critically enriched by her experiences as an inner-city teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District and English-as-a-Second-Language teacher in mainland China.  Publications include Harvard Educational Review and The China Quarterly. She can be contacted via email: liyiu@hku.hk.

Research Highlighted:

Poole, A. (2020). Constructing International School Teacher Identity from Lived Experience: A Fresh Conceptual Framework. Journal of Research in International Education. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1475240920954044

Abstract

This research note offers background information to my recent paper (Poole, 2020) published in the Journal of Research in International Education. The paper argues for the need to move beyond distilling international school teachers’ experiences into a teacher type or teacher typologies, and instead to take teachers’ lived experiences as an end in themselves. Lived experience is characterised by a certain kind of ambivalence, messiness, and complexity that typologies are unable to capture.

In attempting to better convey what I mean by international school teachers’ lived experiences, I make an analogy to The Beatles. Whilst it may seem somewhat irrelevant at first, I ask the reader to indulge me. The connection will become apparent soon enough.

As a teenager, I was obsessed with the Beatles. I knew their music inside and out. My ear became so familiar with their sound that I could name any of their songs within the first few beats. However, when the Beatles released a collection of outtakes and rarities as part of their Anthology series, it felt like I was listening to them again for the first time. I was struck at how clear the initial performances were. Often, the first take would consist of drums, guitar and bass. When listened to in this form, the music was vibrant. It had a warm resonant room sound to it, as if you were in the room whilst it was being played. It was rough. You could hear the mistakes. The fingers fumbling for the chords. A guide vocal leaking into the drum microphones. Takes breaking down. False starts. It was honest. However, once the recordings had been over-dubbed, mistakes corrected, that room sound was gone. It no longer felt as if you were in the room with the band. It did not feel honest. Suddenly, those recordings that my ear had grown so accustomed to felt like imitations.

The above analogy helps to convey what I am trying to do in my research in relation to teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools. I am listening for the resonant room sound of their lived experiences.

The International School arena was once considered to be somewhat anomalous (Pearce, 2013) and something of a well-kept secret. Traditional International Schools, or Type A schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013), were designed for the children of a global trans-national elite, who required schooling that would enable them to enter a university in their home countries. However, in the last ten years or so, a new type of international school has emerged. Rather than catering to the children of transnational elites, these new schools, referred to as Type C non-traditional schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013), are frequented by indigenous middle-class families. Within China, these Type C schools have been referred to as ‘Chinese bilingual schools’, or, as I like to call them, ‘Chinese Internationalised Schools.’ Chinese Internationalised Schools typically follow the Chinese National Curriculum until grade 9, with students transitioning to some type of international curriculum (such as International General Certificate of Secondary Educations, Advanced Levels or the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme) for the remainder of their high school years.

Along with this shift from traditional to non-traditional international schooling, we can also see the emergence of a new type of international school teacher. Typically, teachers in Type A schools will be licensed practitioners back in their home countries and/or have experience of teaching. Whilst this type of teacher can be found in Type C schools, the vast majority (at least in Chinese Internationalised Schools) are not career teachers. Rather, they are what Bailey and Cooker (2019) call ‘Accidental Teachers’. These teachers may not necessarily be qualified teachers, yet they still find employment in Chinese Internationalised Schools, if not always for their professional capital, then certainly for their ‘ethnic capital’, that is, their embodiment and performance of ‘western whiteness.’

I was an Accidental teacher. I did not set out to be a teacher, but by happenstance, I became one. Before my recent transition to the academic arena, I spent ten years teaching in Chinese Internationalised Schools. To return to the analogy of the ‘room sound’, I was in the room with the teachers. I saw the mistakes. It was live, raw and often raucous. In a colleague’s words, teaching was ‘messy business.’ However, as part of my studies and subsequent research, I found that the work I was reading on international school teachers just did not have that same resonance. That immediacy and messiness was absent. I felt this absence most keenly in studies that presented teachers in terms of types or typologies.

I was reading about ‘the Maverick’ (Hardman, 2001), a global traveller or someone seeking to escape from national constraints and other issues in their home country. It is likely that we all know a teacher who fits this description. I was reading about ‘Type A’ , ‘Type B’ and ‘Type C’ teachers (Bailey & Cooker, 2019). Type A teachers see their job as supporting travel and mobility. Type B teachers see their jobs in ideological terms. Type C teachers view their primary attachment as being to the locale in which the international school is situated. I was reading about the ‘adventurer’ (Rey et al., 2020), young teachers who, to escape the debts they had accrued in their home countries, often due to university fees, flee to teach overseas.

However, I was not reading about me or my colleagues. I was not reading about teachers in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Here were we, complex, dynamic and evolving human beings, reduced to a letter or a type. Where did all the experience go? It was like the label or letter was some kind of cookie cutter, trimming away the superfluity of lived experience.

To return to the analogy of The Beatles and their recordings, I could not hear the resonant room sound of our lived experiences in the literature. This absence was partly due to the novelty of Chinese Internationalised Schools, but also due to a paucity of work that critically engages with the International School Teacher experience (Bailey, 2015). These typologies could be thought of as a form of quantizing or auto-tuning that renders the contradiction and messiness of the lived into processed experience. The Accidental teacher (Bailey & Cooker, 2019) label comes close to capturing our experiences, but is not sufficiently nuanced to capture the heterogeneity within our group.

All of this points to the need for researchers to not only listen to the voices of teachers, but also to capture the resonance of their lived experiences. This is what I attempted to do with my recent paper, and what I am planning to develop in an upcoming book, provisionally entitled International Teacher Identities: Examining Internationalised Schooling in Shanghai. If I can retain the energy and vibrancy of teachers’ lived experiences in a form where theory helps to capture rather than smother the resonant room sound of lived experience, then I will have finally produced something that speaks to both teachers and researchers.   

References

Bailey, L. and Cooker, L. (2019). Exploring teacher identity in international schools: Key concepts for research. Journal of Research in International Education, 18(20), 125-141.

Hardman, J. (2001). Improving recruitment and retention of quality overseas teacher. In S. Blandford, & M. Shaw (Eds.), Managing international schools (pp. 123-135). London: Routledge Falmer.

Hayden, M., & Thompson J. J. (2013). International Schools: Antecedents, current issues and metaphors for the future, in R. Pearce (Ed.), International education and schools: Moving beyond the first 40 years (pp. 3-23). London: Bloomsbury.

Pearce, R. (2013). International Education and Schools: Moving Beyond the First 40 Years. London: Bloomsbury.

Poole, A. (2020). Constructing international school teacher identity from lived experience: A fresh conceptual framework. Journal of Research in International Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475240920954044

Rey, J. Bolay, M. & Gez, Y. N. (2020). Precarious privilege: personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1-13. doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1732193

Author’s bio

Adam is Director of Research in the Institute of Impact Studies in Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). Along with his colleagues in the institute, Adam is currently developing a project to establish the pedagogical needs of teachers and stakeholders in BFSU International. His research interests include international teachers’ experiences in international schools, teacher professional identity, and developing the funds of identity concept. He is currently writing a book, which explores teachers lived experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools in more depth. Adam can be reached at tyger106@hotmail.com and via his profile page at Research Gate. His ORCID identification is orcid.org/0000-0001-5948-0705.

Research Highlighted

Li, B., & Shen, Y. (2020). Publication or pregnancy? Employment contracts and childbearing of women academics in China. Studies in higher education, 1-13. doi:10.1080/03075079.2020.1817888

The ‘publish or perish’ system has been widespread in the global higher education sector to incentivize academic performance. How the system affects academics in non-western countries has received scant attention. In recent years, more and more Chinese universities start to introduce a tenure track system in which the employees sign a fixed term contract with interim and end of term reviews. After the review, the employees would either be promoted to tenure positions or lose their jobs. The term of contracts would usually be 4-6 years. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include numbers of publications and successful grant applications.

In our recent article “Publication or pregnancy? Employment contracts and childbearing of women academics in China”, we used a mix-method approach to understand the relationships between contract types, work pressure, childbearing intentions and individual coping strategies. The quantitative analyses show the relationships between these factors, and the qualitative results provide in-depth understanding on how women academics acted in response to the changing evaluation and contracting practices.

Our research compared the differential impact of fix-term and permanent contracts on women academics. We examined their perceived work pressure and the childbearing decisions of women academics in China. The survey data were collected in 2019 through an online survey of 453 women academics working in universities across China. The research establishes a significant correlation between the types of contracts and the reproductive practices of women academics of childbearing age. In order to obtain more detailed information on the underlying consequences of the new system and the respondents’ coping strategies, interviews were conducted with women academics across different stages of their career.

We found that 70% of the respondents considered that fixed term contracts increased the pressure to write and publish. 82% experienced psychological pressure and worried about contract renewal. People working under fixed term contract felt more stressed than those who did not sign the contract. What is more, it had increased the anticipated pressure for those who were about to sign a fixed term contract. Women academics and PhDs have adapted their reproductive behaviour in response to the greater work pressure. The data shows that there is a significant difference in the timing of childbearing between women who had signed a fixed term contract and those who had not. Nearly 70% of the respondents who had ever signed fixed-term contacts had deliberately moved forward or delayed their childbearing, a much higher rate than those who had not signed fixed-term contracts (37%). However, their adaptation cannot solve all the problems they have to face and could cause vulnerability and inequality. More and more PhD students give birth before they graduate. Universities and supervisors, however, are slow to meet their childcare needs. Employers are reported to prefer women PhDs who have already had children upon recruitment.

The findings also show that the new system adopted in China offers higher risk contracts with higher pay than the old-fashioned permanent contract. Some respondents recognise the benefit of the new system. However, because employers do not necessarily take into account women’s reproductive needs, the incentives come at the costs of high pressure and staff anxiety.

The findings confirm widespread influences of a managerialist approach to stimulate research outputs in academia. Against the background of the new family planning policy and the growing favour of managerialism in China, our paper sheds new light on the impact of the introduction of a competitive employment system on employees’ work and life balance and the interaction between employment status, reproductive behaviour and mental stress.

We provide several suggestions to policy makers and university management. It is worth noting that the fixed-term system is new in most universities in China. Universities may have been overly excited about the magic power of ‘publish or perish’ contracts to stimulate research outputs and failed to notice that in other countries that have adopted the system, there are supportive arrangements for women. The fact that some respondents reported that some universities had introduced additional policies to improve the situation shows that university management can have the goodwill to improve. In addition to learning from international best practices, universities planning to introduce the probation-tenure system could learn from other universities in China that have made adjustments to support women. In addition, the state as a regulator of universities may consider establishing guidelines to minimize the difficulties that women academics have to face as the evaluation practices change. Supporting both employers and families simultaneously would be more effective than supporting one side alone.

Authors’ biography

Dr Bingqin Li is SHARP (special hire) Professor and the Director of the Chinese Social Policy Stream at Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) at University of New South Wales in Sydney. She received her PhD in Social Policy from LSE UK. Before moving to UNSW, she worked at LSE and Australian National University. Her research is on social inequality, urbanisation and local governance in China. Her current projects include local government social service delivery, disability employment and digital economy, aging, urban and community development.  Google Scholar UNSW official page

Dr Yang Shen is an associate professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She did her PhD in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. Her current research projects include women’s fertility practices, housing and intimacy and online dating in China. Her academic articles have appeared in Journal of Family Issues, China Quarterly, Habitat International, Policy Studies, among others. Her book monograph ‘Beyond tears and laughter: gender, migration and the service sector in China’ has been published by Palgrave in 2019.

Relevant publications by the authors

Shen, Y. & Li, B (2020) Policy coordination in the talent war to achieve economic upgrading: the case of four Chinese cities, Policy Studies. Online first.

Shen, Y. & Jiang, L. (2020). Labour Market Outcomes of Professional Women with Two Children After the One-Child Policy in China, Journal of Social Issues. Early view.

Shen, Y. & Jiang, L. (2020). Reproductive choices of highly educated employed women with two children under the universal two-child policy, Journal of Family Issues, 41(5): 611-635.

Research Highlighted:

Wu, Jinting. (2019). Confucian revival and the hybrid educational narratives in contemporary China: A critical rethinking of scale in globalisation and education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 17(4), 474-488.

Today China witnesses a renaissance of classical studies and Confucian Academies across the nation. With an estimated 10 million children attending Confucian kindergartens, classes, and schools, cultural heritage has increasingly become a new marker of social distinction. Meanwhile, Confucian tradition is often associated with excessive testing, competition, and academic burdens that continue to hinder China’s educational innovation. In this paper, I attempt to examine such hybrid educational narratives to understand the idiosyncratic features of Chinese educational globalisation. This paper also problematises the dominant hierarchical conception of scale in comparative education research and rethinks globalisation as a comingling and friction of multiple imagined communities.

Throughout China’s dynastic and modern history, the shifting narratives of Confucian doctrine have always corresponded with China’s changing educational paradigms. The first period occurred in the late Qing dynasty when the Ti-Yong debates upheld Chinese classical learning as the essence (Ti) and denigrated Western learning as mere utility (Yong). The second period occurred in the May Fourth Movement in 1919 when intellectual elites radically rejected traditional values and promoted the Western utilitarian approach to education, resulting in an overall suppression of Confucianism and classical texts in the educational system (Pepper 2000, 61). The third major change took place during the communist rule when China adopted the Soviet model to educate citizens as both ideologically correct and technically savvy (you hong you zhuan), leading to the branding of Confucian teaching as feudalist and antirevolutionary. The fourth major change was at the turn of the twenty-first century when the structural subordination of students to teachers and test-based curricula in state schools have been identified as setbacks to Chinese educational competitiveness. Curriculum reformers turned to the Anglo-American child-centred pedagogies as a critique of Confucian rote learning and inscription of social hierarchy. While Confucian pedagogical practices are challenged, curiously, today’s China also witnesses the ‘rehabilitation’ of the ancient sage and the all-out search for classical wisdom, a cultural and educational movement involving people from diverse backgrounds and facilitated by mass media, the market, the state, and the academia.

The newest wave of Confucian revival coincides with the tightening of the state grip in post-reform China. The state becomes a tireless champion of ancient classics in its strive for modernity, which can be seen in a number of public commentaries made by President Xi Jinping, deploring the de-Sinicisation of school curricula and promoting Confucian legacy as the ‘cultural gene of the Chinese nation.’ While the current Confucian revival is aptly seen as a form of state governing and social control, ordinary people also actively appropriate Confucian teachings to orient themselves in China’s dizzying socioeconomimc dislocation. 

A media studies professor, Yu Dan offered popular interpretation of The Analects (lunyu) in China Central Television’s popular program Lecture Room (baijia jiangtan), and enjoyed immense popularity among ordinary Chinese citizens who are hungry for existential guidance to navigate the whirlpool of socioeconomic changes. Additionally, scholars also aid the Confucian revival movement by offering national studies classes (guoxueban) to business entrepreneurs in leading universities. These classes appeal to businesspersons who seem to aspire for a model of the ‘Confucian enterpreneur’ (ru shang) by translating their material wealth into ‘cultured’ social distinction (Wu and Wenning 2016, 563). Meanwhile, there are many Confucian academies and classics chanting programs that appeal to parents who are disillusioned with the exam-centred educational system and look to alternatives in the hope to provide a more human, nurturing learning environment. While Western progressive educational philosophies are widely sought after by urban parents, on the other hand, the learning of traditional Chinese culture and values has also undergone a boom in recent decades (Pang 2014). A growing number of middle-class children attended private Confucian academies alongside mainstream schools, which, occupying a growing market niche and often charging substantial fees, teach the young recruits proper filial behaviours, a balanced and healthy living style, and cultural literacy through activities such as calligraphy, martial arts, tea ceremony, and chanting classics (Yu 2016). Classical learing in Confucian academies offers one of the latest educational models through which parents explore alternative pathways to cultivate high suzhi of the child, defined as cosmopolitan, mobile, creative, and knowledgeable in the global neoliberal economy.

The revival of Confucianism presents a cultural-educational lens to understand Chinese nationalism and globalisation. As China continues to grow economically and looks inward to take stock of its own cultural heritage, Confucian teachings re-entered to parry the Western cultural influence. The concept of guoxue re (the craze of national studies) captures a distinct form of nationalism in today’s China. It is hybrid moment of cultivating world citizens with Chinese hearts, and can be interpreted as a collective form of cultural intimacy, described by Herzfeld (1997) as the larger concerns of the nation-state intertwining with the everyday desires of its citizens to form a curious space comprehensible only with an insider’s sensitivity. The popular vision of foreign superiority and Chinese backwardness has been retooled by an orientation towards a greater understanding of China’s cultural distinctiveness and the dual needs for Sinicisation and globalisation.

Based on the case of the Confucian revival, I offer a critical perspective to rethink the concept of scale and the global-national-local distinction in comparative education research. Much energy in comparative studies of education has been devoted to spatialising the differences, making the global-local binary ever more durable. Classrooms and schools are often considered as the local, state policies and bureaucracy as the national, and international travelling discourse as the global. Yet, the utility of scale is increasingly called into question. Scholars in human and cultural geography have had sustained theoretical reflection on the concept of scale, positing that scale is less of a physical domain than an interplay of different regimes of value, and the ways in which certain values become hegemonic. Indeed, scalar logic reinforces a hierarchy of knowledge production, where some forms of knowledge are taken as paradigms, and other forms of knowledge as contained in local particularity. A flexible understanding of scale as flat ontology, on the other hand, attempts to denaturalise the material effects of assigning the global more causual force and regarding others as merely derivative (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005).

Confucian revival is not merely a national (or nationalistic) phenomenon; it is simultaneously deeply localised – in shaping parental strategies at childrearing – and global in reach, speaking to the worldwide interest in Confucian Heritage Culture associated with Chinese students’ academic achievement and China’s economic and political ascendency. Confucian revival is a site of multiple imagined communities – of the nation-state, students and families, self-searching populace, global China watchers, and much more. It is simultaneously a local, national, and global phenomenon which renders the scalar logic unproductive. Hence, in the field of comparative education, scale needs not to be seen as a ‘matter of fact’, but a ‘matter of concern’. This paper urges us to move beyond seeing scales as physical entities to seeing them as assemblages and frictions of imagined communities, discourses, values, and meanings.

Jinting Wu, 2019

References:

Herzfeld, M. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York, NY: Routledge.

Marston, S. A., J. P. Jones, III, and K. Woodward. 2005. “Human Geography Without Scale.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (4): 416–432.

Pang, Qin. 2014. “‘The Two Lines Control Model’ in China’s State and Society Relations: Central State’s Management of Confucian Revival in the New Century.” International Journal of China Studies 5 (3): 627–655.

Pepper, S. 2000. Radicalism and Education Reform in Twentieth-Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wu, J., and M. Wenning. 2016. “The Postsecular Turn in Education: Lessons from the Mindfulness Movement and the Revival of Confucian Academies.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 35: 551–571.

Yu, Hua. 2016. “Between the National and the International: Ethnography of Language Ideologies in a Middle-Class Community in China.” The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher 25 (5): 703–711.

Author Bio

Dr Jinting Wu is Assistant Professor of Educational Culture, Policy and Society. She is an educational anthropologist with an interest in philosophy and cultural studies. Her research often deploys ethnographic field methods to critically investigate relationships among schooling, society, and culture; it also examines educational policy shifts both as lived experiences and as reflecting the larger spheres of cultural ideation, social (re)production, nation building and globalization. Recent projects have involved study of rural minority education, child disabilities and special education, immigrant youth and families, and educational meritocracy on the global stage. Prior to joining the GSE faculty, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Macau (SAR, China) and was a postdoctoral fellow of educational sciences at the University of Luxembourg. Jinting is author of Fabricating an Educational Miracle (SUNY Press, 2017 AERA Division B Outstanding Book Recognition Award; The Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award).