Teachers’ Discursive Constructions of ‘Learning’ in Neoliberal Times: Insights from a Chinese Public Middle School

• In Event: Learning Across Contexts

Abstract

This study investigates how teachers in a Chinese public middle school frame “learning” through classroom discourse, amid the intersection of global neoliberal culture and local educational traditions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, it shows how teachers downplay learning’s dominance in students’ holistic lives while emphasizing self-management and responsibility, reframing the connection between learning and “doing personhood”. Across subjects, they stress both the instrumental value of knowledge and the cultivation of transferable personal traits through learning. Linking learning to imagined futures, teachers construct a “hardship-ease” narrative, positioning academic effort as a path to self-realization rather than national contribution. The study reveals how neoliberal logics interact with local cultural meanings, complicating discursive constructions of learning in everyday classroom practices.

Author

• Yunshu Zhu, Qufu Normal University