Play Activities and Incorporation Experience of Rural-to-Urban Migrant Children in China

• In Event: 4167 - Section on Children and Youth Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Children & Youth Roundtable 5: Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Large numbers of rural-to-urban migrant children have brought tremendous educational challenges to big cities of China since the 1990s. In existing literature, scholars and policy makers have examined migrant children’s well-being and incorporation in urban areas mainly through their formal schooling experiences, like school enrollment ratio and test scores, with less consideration about their everyday life beyond formal schooling time. Based on multiple-years fieldwork in a migrant elementary school in Beijing, this paper digs into migrant children’s everyday life through their play activities to better understand their incorporation experience in urban areas. Through depicting and analyzing three typical types of play activities in migrant children’s everyday life, we identify three important settings shaping their incorporation experience: in school, through interaction with the external world, and in family. Each setting contains specific cultural and structural incorporation elements, which show that these migrant children have been incorporated into the city while situated in marginal positions. This study has important implications for studies on immigrant incorporation and migrant children’s well-being both in China and around the world.

Authors

• Man Yao, The Ohio State University

• Qian Liu