Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM)

Research Highlighted:

Geng Wang & Lesley Doyle (2020): Constructing false consciousness: vocational college students’ aspirations and agency in China, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 1-18. DOI: 10.1080/13636820.2020.1829008

Read about Dr Wang’s other article here.

ABSTRACT

Individual academic achievement is highly valued in Chinese society, with vocational education students positioned at the bottom of the educational hierarchy and suffering considerable societal prejudice. In this paper we present new findings from the choice-making experiences of students in two vocational education colleges in China, how they are perceived by their teachers, and how, in the context of their negatively-stereotyped status, they perceive themselves. Drawing on the Marxist notion of false consciousness to help understand the agency of these students, we found that almost all perceived themselves as being agentic and having control over their destiny. They felt they only had themselves to blame for the stereotyping to which they were subjected. One student had not adopted this mindset and was critical of the exam system. We argue that the perceived agency of the majority of the students resonates strongly with the neoliberal values which are associated with responsibilisation, and which have been encouraged in China since the 1970s with the beginning of the Reform Era. The evidence from our study also suggests, however, that it is possible for young people, by their own efforts, to move away from the state of false consciousness.

Introduction

In this paper, we focus on vocational education college students. We present new findings from interviews and focus groups with a sample of these students and their teachers and locate the findings within the debate on the concept of ‘youth agency’. The paper seeks theoretical purchase on the ‘agency’ of Chinese VET students through an innovative exploration of the Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness’.

Theoretical framework

Michael Apple, in Ideology and Curriculum, has been examining why Marxist understanding has not been more impactful in Anglo-Western educational investigation (Apple 2019, 135). He argues that the neglect of this scholarly tradition says more about the fear-laden past of society than it does about the merits of the (all too often unexplored) tradition, which indicates it is difficult ‘for there to be acceptance of a position which holds that most social and intellectual categories are themselves valuative in nature and may reflect ideological commitments’ (136). Apple argues that the Marxist tradition illuminates the tendencies for unwarranted and often unconscious domination, alienation and repression within educational institutions and promotes conscious individual and collective emancipatory activity (137). The Marxist tradition also has the potential to connect the students’ perspectives with White and Wyn’s (1998) ‘existing social relations’ (referred to above), and to locate them within a broad political economy approach. We concur with Sukarieh and Tannock (2015) who argue that ‘to understand the significance of youth in global society, it is … necessary to look well beyond youth and young people in and of themselves’ (4). Most significantly, we argue that the concept of false consciousness carries with it the assumption that it is possible for young people to think their way out of their predicament.

Findings

The findings of the study suggest that vocational colleges or programmes were chosen by students as the last resort or ‘leftover option’ in a bid to obtain an educational credential. The students’ lower test scores in the College Entrance Exam (CEE) had automatically limited their capacity to be ‘free choosers’. Nearly all of those in the student sample, and all in the teacher sample regarded the CEE exam as efficient in what they saw as weeding out weak students. To most of the students, ‘it (the exam system) is pretty fair’. The students’ sense of personal failure and inadequacy is echoed by the teachers stereotyping of them as unmotivated students with a habit of ‘slacking off’, or ‘bad seeds’, from which nothing worthwhile can grow, or poor learners who never ‘get’ the textbook. Rather than having an ‘agentic’ feeling, the vocational students felt fatalistic or powerless when they were ‘dropped down’ and had to relegate themselves to vocational colleges or forego the opportunity of going to college at all.

Discussion and Conclusion

We conclude that the young people’s interpretations of their situation – that it is their personal failure in not achieving better test scores (which they associate with ensuring a better life) are evidence of false consciousness, as conceived by Engels (1893) and Marx and Engels (1846). The young people have formed false perceptions of their own agency in the belief that they have the power to control their own achievement level and, through this, that they have freedom of choice to determine their own futures. The current exam system has secured active collusion from these vocational students at the same time as it generates the poor outcomes. The students are under the impression that they only have themselves to blame and they should take responsibility their own misfortune. This perceived sense of ‘agency’ – in the sense we understand here as control of one’s own destiny along with the sense of personal responsibility for making choices – is, we argue, created by false consciousness which helps to sustain the hegemonic control neoliberal economies need to survive. The perspective of Jia, as the only exception who did not accept the unified ‘false’ discourse, offers evidence that young people can have the capability to move away from the state of false consciousness. We conclude that the concept of false consciousness provides the opportunity for a critical turn in understanding agency, which for too long has been used in the drive to find some form of self-driven personal empowerment in young people, even when the evidence for it is thin. False consciousness offers a different theoretical perspective within the educational community, which can, as Apple (2019) explains: ‘contribute to the creation of alternative programmes of research and development that challenge the commonsense assumptions that underpin the field’ (Apple 2019). We suggest that this theoretical perspective could further improve our understanding of youth decision-making outside of VET and in countries other than China.

Author bio:

Dr Geng Wang currently works as a researcher at School of Education, Tianjin University, China. She is also a member of Tianjin Institute for Emerging Engineering Education. She holds a PhD (University of Glasgow) in education. Her research interests revolve around education and work transitions through the lifecourse, particularly in relation to vocational education and training for young people, what influences transitions and their impact on learning and development. She can be contacted via geng.wang0313@hotmail.com.

Research Highlighted:

Dai, K., & Hardy, I. (2020). The micro-politics of cultural change: a Chinese doctoral student’s learning journey in Australia. Oxford Review of Education, 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2020.1825369

Read about Kun’s other publication here.

Abstract

Considerable research has investigated Chinese students’ intercultural insights in different national contexts, where culture is understood as coterminous with nationality/regionality. However, few have explored the more micro-political aspects of Chinese doctoral students’ narrative experiences in national settings, within a more cultural framework. This article seeks to take such an approach through a reflexive narrative account of the first author’s experiences as a Chinese doctoral student in Australia. To do so, we draw upon Bhabha’s notion of “in-between space”, and work by Gill on intercultural adjustment. We show how the first author’s doctoral journey was characterised by a sense of “in-betweenness” at the micro-political level, including in relation to the cultural boundary crossing associated with having to change fields of study and supervisors. This narrative provides a nuanced account of an international student’s experiences and reflects the usefulness of examining the particularity of international doctoral students’ learning experiences at a much more fine-grained level, via a more intercultural lens.

Introduction

Doctoral education is a significant part of the HE system and doctoral students are also one of the major groups contributing substantively to creativity and innovation in knowledge, which productively influences the development of society (Shin, Postiglione, & Ho, 2018). At the same time, when international doctoral students encounter different academic and sociocultural contexts, they experience complex changes to their identity, with attendant changes to their sense of agency as diasporic academics (Lee & Elliot, 2020). As part of this journey, vacillating between the standpoints of being a more independent and dependent learner, as a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate, can be associated with senses of both empowerment and disempowerment (Goode, 2007). Thus, doctoral students’ learning experiences can be very diverse, so it is necessary to understand the specificity of the circumstances within which these students conduct their research in different educational contexts (Pearson et al., 2011). To contribute to scholarship in this field, we illustrate and analyse the first author’s experiences as an international doctoral student at an Australian university, and how specific micro-political intercultural issues that he faced during his journey influenced his learning through this experience.

Research Method

This study adopts notions of intercultural adjustment, especially Gill’s (2007) analysis of Chinese students’ transformative learning framework. Furthermore, Bhabha’s (1994) concept of in-between space was used to examine the fluidity of the first author’s experiences through a more critical lens. To tell the story of this positioning in various in-between spaces of intercultural adjustment as part of the first author’s doctoral journey, we draw upon a reflexive narrative approach. In this study, we adopted narrative as the method to frame the data analysis. At the same time, we recognise that the first author’s story/ies is/are not simply a product of his “own” understandings of the world, but also the result of the broader conditions within which his story/ies become comprehensible. By adopting these approaches, we were able to critically and reflexively examine his experiences whilst maintaining confidentiality.

Findings

The narrative started with illustrating the first author’s doctoral research journey in a cross-disciplinary context from Digital Media to Education. As he has studied in Australia for about three years, he felt confident in this initial stage even though he changed his focus from digital media to educational technology. After starting his journey, he gradually realized that he might not get proper supervision, and then he worried about his research. However, dramas always happened. His supervisors left the university, and he had no choice but to change supervision teams. Due to the differences between his research focus and the new supervisor’s expertise, while they worked together and attempted to make his study better, his research was still not on the right track. In the third-year assessment, internal panel members still questioned his research. After this assessment, change happened again. Unfortunately, the new supervisor needed to retire due to personal reason and left the university. In this case, he felt so disempowered and lacked the confidence to complete the study. Luckily, he found new supervisors to support him. Although research topics have been changed due to the shift of supervisions teams, he did not give up and finally completed the study. When he reflected his journey, he felt that the doctoral journey is a process of shaping a sense of in-betweenness: shifting between different research fields, topics, and supervision teams.

Discussion

Based on the first author’s ‘zigzag ‘doctoral learning experience, this study reveals that his PhD journey positioned him in an in-between space where he was constantly immersed in a cycle of stress-adaptation-development, and where he established a sense of in-betweenness, characterised by different senses of agency, identity, and belonging. In these arrangements, power was always at play. Various predictable (e.g. change of majors) and unpredictable changes (e.g. changes of advisors) dynamically and constantly positioned him within different power dynamics. The interaction between intercultural adjustment model and the concept of in-between space shed light on this learning transition, particularly in relation to the micro-politics of cultural change that surrounded the forms of cross-disciplinary academic cultural adaptation he had to undertake in his journey. Importantly, they also flag the significant power relations more broadly that infused his whole doctoral journey. His reactions to the changes indicate a resilience towards expected and unexpected adversities as well as the effects of such power relations.

His journey suggests that he was in the stress-adaptation-development trajectory, but in a very different way from how such a trajectory is conceptualised in existing literature. It could not only be adopted in the analysis of more typical nationally/regionally based intercultural learning and adjustment, but also could be used as a lens to theorise and analyse more micro-political processes of learning trajectories. Moreover, his PhD research trajectory indicated he was ultimately able to become a self-determined and active agent (Marginson, 2014) but this process was tortuous with many twists and turns, establishing a complex sense of in-betweenness in response to different expected and unpredictable changes. His experience indicates that he was immersed in a unique in-between space that was created by constant negotiations between colonising and colonised cohorts, complicated relations of power, and various clashes in and between different types of “cultures”, which potentially shape individual hybridity and sense of in-betweenness.

Conclusion
This study revealed that as a result of the first author’s peculiar cross-disciplinary academic cultural adaptation, he became an in-betweener at not just the macro level of culture, but at a micro-political level. In this particular space, he had to navigate twists and turns in different stages of the learning journey which was not a straightforward process of stress-adaptation-development as some other studies have found. In contrast, his journey was a pathway of continuous processes of stress, adapting and development, characterised by a more or less continuous sense of in-betweenness in relation to each of these states. His experiences certainly confirm doctoral learning and research journeys as complicated rather than linear. However, students may engage in multi-faceted and complex journeys, far beyond what might be anticipated.

Authors’ bios:

Dr Kun Dai is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Funded by China International Postdoc Exchange Program) at Graduate School of Education, Peking University. His research focuses on transnational higher education, international students mobility, intercultural learning and adjustment, teaching and learning in higher education.

Dr Ian Hardy is an Associate Professor at the School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia. Dr Hardy’s research focuses on educational policy, globalisation, and teacher education.