Live-Streaming Technology and Rural Schooling in Western China

• In Event: Moscone Center West Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: (Re)Productions of Culture and Community: Media, Marginalization, and Power

Abstract

Rural students in China face poor-quality, strict and exam-oriented education. In everyday and professional discourse, the incorporation of live-streaming technologies within rural schooling would improve educational quality and narrow the urban-rural education gap. Invoking the theory of three curriculum futures by sociologists of curriculum, we examine how high school students in a rural, poverty-stricken county in Yunnan Province perceive and act upon the suzhi-oriented (quality) curriculum delivered by live-streaming courses. We maintain that live-streaming technologies work hand-in-hand with education for suzhi to transmit class-based curricular knowledge, entrapping rural students in the predicament of contested curricular knowledge and potential school failure.

Authors

• Miao Li, Shandong University

• Yajuan Xiang, Sonoma State University

• Qiang Zhang, Shandong Yingcai University