Han and Mongolian migrant girls’ educational empowerment: a comparison

• In Event: Educating vulnerable youth in China’s urbanizing context: the schooling of rural, migrant and ethnic minority children

Proposal

Along with the diminishing traditional agricultural and nomadic ways of life, China has become a majority urban country since the inception of the Open-Door policy, tripling the share of urban population from 17.9 in 1978 to 58.8 percent in 2018 (Xinhuanet, 2018). Hundreds of millions of rural residents have been floating to cities and joined the ranks of the low-skilled segmented labor market. Their children, due to the compulsory education law and the hukou system (residence restriction), have been restricted from attending post-compulsory public schools in the cities. For rural migrant students accessing technical and vocational education and training (TVET) senior secondary and post-secondary schools has been more achievable. Young women, many of whom are unaccompanied where they attend non-public TVET schools in cities, are vulnerable to risks, discrimination, and second-class status in the job market based on their gender and rural identity.

Purpose
This paper explores and compares the opportunities for empowerment of rural, majority ethnic Han (Han) and rural, minority ethnic Mongolian (Meng) girls in senior secondary and tertiary TVET schools, within current educational policy and structures, prevalent gendered cultural norms, and the job market in China’s massive urbanization. The research questions ask how Han and Meng girls in Shaanxi and Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region (IMAR) respectively experience schooling opportunities and empowerment as they are impacted by their different macro-contexts – using a comparative lens. Are educational opportunities for empowerment similar for Han and Meng girls, and do they lead to comparable second-class status in urbanization? Questions regarding context characteristics include hukou system, affirmative action educational policies, unequal labor market practices, and gendered cultural norms.

Conceptual framework
We adopt a capability approach as it gives a central role to the ability of people to be agents of their own lives, which necessitates an education to reason and speak on one’s own behalf (Alkire & Deneulin, 2009). Inherent in this framework is the notion that agency is the ability to pursue opportunities, such as education, and make changes that one has reason to value (Sen, 1999), hence, education gives rise to empowerment.

Methodology
This is a qualitative, comparative case study, consisting of two field work sites and semi-structured interviews: rural Han girls originating in a remote region of Shaanxi since 2001 and rural Mongolian girls in Inner Mongolia since 2017 .

Implications and Conclusion
Preliminary interpretations of our findings show that the Han girls from Shaanxi encountered poverty-related hardships in attending and staying in neglected, under-resourced schools and were subject to Confucian Chinese patriarchal discounting of women’s worth. Mongolian girls in IMAR had attended comparatively well-equipped, well-supported, larger schools from an early age provided by central government preferential policies for autonomous ethnic minority regions on national borders and had inherited a more gender-egalitarian status in Mongolian culture. Conclusions on comparable empowerment will be drawn in this second phase of the research leading to implications for social change in their communities, as well as for policy to promote virtuous cycles of urbanization, and the global order.

Authors

• Ya Na, Kent State University

• Liangtao Ni, Kent State University

• Yu Li, Kent State University

• Debra Clark, Kent State University

• Vilma Seeberg, Kent State University