Symbolic capital and ethnolinguistic boundaries at Tibetan supplemental education programs

• In Event: 20480 - Education and Society: Institutional Interactions and Reciprocal Influences

Abstract

Framework
Scholars often conceptualize supplemental education as ‘shadow’ programs that provide instruction on what is ‘taught and tested’ in school (Bray 2017). However, others emphasize the potential for such programs to transmit valuable and culturally-specific knowledges beyond the explicit curriculum of mainstream schooling, especially for students whose home cultures are marginalized therein (Lareau 2015). This paper therefore responds to the question: How is educationally valuable cultural capital conceptualized by Tibetan educators and how do Tibetan supplemental programs (“sabjong”) facilitate its acquisition?

Methods
I conducted ‘extended case’ ethnographic research in Qinghai, China comprising 70 days of participant observation and 101 interviews with parents, students, and educators. Fieldwork probed role modeling in student-teacher interactions at sabjong and perspectives on what dispositions and knowledges are acquired at sabjong and what makes them valuable.

Findings
First, because mainstream teachers must ‘teach to the test’ and avoid politically sensitive issues, deviating from - rather than ‘shadowing’ - mainstream education allowed sabjong to facilitate the acquisition of dominant and non-dominant cultural capital. Second, sabjong educators modeled ethnically desirable ways to acquire dominant cultural capital, emphasizing that it ought to be acquired not merely for its individualized benefits (i.e., “instrumentally”) but ultimately for the positive impact it has on the ethnic group (i.e., “altruistically”), thus distinguishing their educational pursuits from ‘Chinese’ schooling and the attitudes that characterize it. Finally, teachers too acquired important symbolic capital at sabjong: By ‘paying forward’ their privilege to the community, teachers demonstrated their acquisition and use of cultural capital was altruistic, and, therefore, legitimate.

Significance
These findings elaborate Bourdieusian theory on the symbolic capital of minoritized populations in authoritarian states and on the role capital plays in maintaining ethnic boundaries in schooled societies (Wallace 2023; Richards 2020), demonstrating the culturally generative nature of these programs that do much more than ‘shadow’ mainstream schooling.

Author

• Andrew David Frankel, Denison University