Unlocking Educational Audit Culture in Southwest China

• In Event: Educational Reform and the Problem of Subjectification: Deglobalizing the Global

Abstract

On a global scale, performance audit has taken up the tenor of scientism as the prevailing system of thought to enact more effective management and accountability. It has also permeated education’s discursive field as a regime of governing for the organization and assessment of schooling. As a compulsory apparatus that orders what is thinkable as the ideal teacher, student, and educational conduct, it produces particular notion of truth and subjectivity. Education’s uptake of performance audit is facilitated by an appeal to ‘reform’ as a means for problem solving and as the predominant mode of reasoning in public schooling.

In light of the symposium’s goal to highlight the complexities and tensions of educational reforms predicated on an assemblage of rationalities, this paper illuminates the paradoxes and frictions of educational audit as a particular ‘regime of truth’ that exerts overt disciplinary power in everyday pedagogical practices and also simultaneously produces fractures in the transcendental teleology of such ‘truth.’ Specifically, I investigate how one rural minority school in southwest China copes with the whimsical rituals of educational inspection and performs strategic alignment with the accountability demand.
The paper highlights the visual, the performative, the political aspects of the audit ritual, and suggests the rethinking of China’s reform-era dilemmas of educational governing.

The research draws on two methodological strands: one is based upon sixteen months of ethnographic, oral historical, and archival research conducted in a Miao and a Dong village-town in Southeast Guizhou Province of China; the other is enlightened by a historico-genealogical perspective that looks beyond the level of ‘observable’ data to investigate the historical systems of reasoning that govern how things come to be the way they are. This approach enables me to consider educational audit as a historical event conditioned by genealogical registering and situated in China’s discursive field of accountability monitoring.

In my narrative, I argue against a singular understanding of school inspection as engendering homogenous conformity to exemplary norms and official regulations. The dictate of efficiency and progress within the rational-secular politics of audit is transformed, tamed, and re-narrated as experienced from the margin. The ‘rational’ and ‘progressive’ outlook of educational audit is replete with contradictory strategies that rupture the emancipatory reason d’etre of schooling. I contend that the overt practices of compliance and the covert manipulation form odd ethnographic juxtapositions and interstices. It is such interstices that constitutes a critical analytic to understand the profound disenchantment of education in rural ethnic China—a disenchantment manifested ironically in the performative complicity with the audit regime to concoct a visuality of upbeat success. It is such interstices that reveal how rural schooling fabricates and sustains the image of success despites its hidden contradictions, resistances, and ironies.

Author

• Jinting Wu, University of Wisconsin - Madison