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

Abstract

Since the economic reforms of the late 1970s, a generation of Chinese rural migrant children are growing up without full access to educational opportunity in the cities where they reside, but lack hukou registry. Privately-run migrant schools, which exist outside the formal state-run system, emerged in response to demand for educational services in the 1990s. Moreover, municipalities like Shanghai have increased this vulnerable population’s educational access into urban public schools. Yet, rural migrant youth’s hukou status continues to undermine their educational opportunity in the city. This article investigates Chinese teachers’ empowerment practices in formal state-sponsored public schools and privately-run migrant children schools. Drawing on interview and participant-observational data from a multi-site ethnography project in a Beijing migrant children school and Shanghai public school, we explore how teachers in two different educational contexts responded to state hukou policies that restricted educational opportunity to their rural migrant students. In particular, we investigate: 1) How do educators conceptualize empowerment for migrant youth in the Chinese context? 2) How do such conceptualizations differ or converge across institutional types? In the critical pedagogy tradition, teachers possess the agency and transformative potential of empowering students to engage in social change (Freire, 1970). According to the critical pedagogy literature (Ellsworth, 1989), the actions by Chinese teachers in both rural migrant and public schools do not constitute empowerment acts. However, we argue the importance of context in re-conceptualizing “empowerment” by raising the question “empowerment from what.” We identify different macro-structural and social factors that influence the institutional school context, as well as the institutional factors influencing teachers’ practices. We contextualize teachers’ practices within China’s strong state context, thus arguing that the actions of teachers to bring value and hope to rural migrant students in both public and migrant schools do constitute acts of empowerment. 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. Chinese teachers’ responses to migrant children provides a critical lens to expand our understanding education as a space of empowerment for socio-political transformation. 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.