Becoming in the Cracks: Teachers’ Lines of Practice in the Implementation of China’s Bi-Transition Policy

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Global Crossroads: Policy, Pedagogy, and Innovation in Asian Education Systems

Abstract

This study explores how Chinese kindergarten and primary teachers navigate the complex realities of implementing the national “bi-transition” policy, intended to bridge early childhood and primary education. Drawing on Deleuze’s concepts of becoming, lines of flight, and assemblage, the study traces how teachers compose micro-practices across institutional, cultural, and policy tensions. Through ethnographic fieldwork, three fluid lines of practice emerge—knowledge, disciplinary, and relational-cultural—revealing how transition is lived not as compliance or resistance, but as a process of creative negotiation and affective labor. The study reimagines policy not as implementation, but as an unstable space of becoming, co-authored by teachers through everyday improvisation, friction, and connection.

Author

• Shuoqi Song, University at Buffalo - SUNY