Young Children's Resistance and Negotiation: Policies and Multilingual Curriculum at an Ethnic-Minority Elementary School

• In Event: Voices Carry: Building and Cultivating Spaces of Resistance

Abstract

Grounded in five months of multimodal data from ethnographic methods and using Foucault as the theoretical lens, this study explores the educational practices and policies at the Hoche elementary school through amplifying Hoche and Han children’s voices to see how they negotiate the multilingual and multicultural curriculum as China undergoes massive shifts to capitalist practices. This work shows how young children respond to and negotiate local policies and curricula that foster a balance between modernization and ethnic cultural uniqueness. We discover Hoche people are tied to a tourist version of a romanticized past that does not align with the realities of Hoche people or the girls’ own desires to participate in a global culture that Chinese economic policies now promote.

Author

• Jue Wang, University of Idaho