Empowerment for What and for Whom: Teacher Practices in Migrant Children School and Public School in China

Abstract

This article investigates Chinese teachers’ talk and practices towards empowerment in formal state ­sponsored public schools and privately ­run migrant children schools. We expand our conceptualization of empowerment to include issues such as citizenship status (hukou system in China), impact of high stakes exams, and education opportunity. We expand our vision of empowerment by including the ways in which educators discuss and engage in empowerment processes for Chinese migrant youth. Drawing on interview and participant­ observational data from a multi­site ethnography project in a Beijing migrant children school and Shanghai public school, we explore how teachers in two different educational contexts understood and responded to the tensions of state policies affecting their rural migrant students. Rural migrant children’s complex educational context is reflected in their institutional sorting into state­run public schools, in which rural migrant youth are educated alongside their peers who have urban hukou, and privately­ run migrant children schools, in which rural migrant youth are educated outside the formal state­run system. To illuminate the extent to which teachers adopt empowerment practices for migrant youth and ways in which teachers navigate complex issues of diversity and equity, we examine the educator patterns of empowerment for migrant youth in two types of educational institutions, one of which is a migrant children school in Beijing, and the other one is a Shanghai public school. We identify different macro­structural and social factors that influence the institutional school context, as well as the institutional factors influencing teachers’ practices. Ultimately, teachers’ different approaches represent how they are trying to make sense of who they are, whom they are working with, and how to better serve/empower their students. Specifically, our inquiry is guided by these two research questions: 1) How do educators conceptualize/understand empowerment for migrant youth in the Chinese context? 2) How do such conceptualizations differ or converge across institutional types? Importantly, this article sheds light on how structural and institutional context influences the extent and ways in which Chinese teachers discuss and engage in empowerment processes for Chinese migrant youth. It also recognizes the significant contribution of teachers who work in the schools that mainly serve migrant children. More broadly, this work contributes to understanding how context is a crucial consideration for effective empowerment practices. Particularly since the majority of empowerment research is situated in Western context, this widened lens provides a more complex, multilayer understanding in conceptualizing and realizing empowerment.