The sustainability and development of Chinese minority education: How an international research collaboration can shed new light on old problems

• In Event: Inclusion and diversity in global and local educational contexts

Proposal

In October 2018, scholars from Yunnan University will meet with researchers from four American universities in Kunming, People’s Republic of China (PRC). The purpose of their week-long meeting will be to launch what is hoped to be a long-term “international academic research collaboration” between the Research Institute of Higher Education at Yunnan University and the College of Education at Washington State University, the College of Education at the University of Idaho, the School of Education at Indiana University and the Department of Sociology at South Dakota State University. The focus of the research collaboration will be “New Trends in Chinese Minority Education in the Globalized World.”

In all, twelve individuals are involved, seven Chinese and five American. The short-term outcomes of the project, to be accomplished during the next three years, are several papers and at least one book, these to be published in Chinese and in English. It is intended that the Chinese scholars be the first authors on each of these works. The long-term outcomes are far broader and include promoting faculty and student exchange, organizing international conferences and various other academic activities. A field trip to the Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, located in eastern Yunnan Province, is part of the initial October 2018 launch meeting.

The project just described is funded by China’s Ministry of Education under the “Double First Class University Plan.” The plan carries with it a 40 billion RMB ($6.04 billion USD) budget to be shared among 42 universities throughout China. The overarching intent of the plan is to develop an already elite group of Chinese higher education institutions into world class universities by 2050. Yunnan University is one of these 42 universities.

The first author of this paper is an education professor at Yunnan University, and together with her dean, the organizer of the research collaboration project. The research interests of the second author, one of the American university participants, center around the sociology of education, particularly minority education. Our goals for this paper are two-fold. The first deals with theory, and the second with praxis.

1) Theory. The sociology of knowledge focuses on the conditions under which a certain piece of knowledge is created. The knowledge we will be considering is minority education. In other words, how do scholars construct knowledge about minority education? Specifically, how are ideas about minority education formed in the contexts of the PRC and of the United States (US)? The varying contexts in which the sociology of education discipline has been born, has developed and has come of age have had great impact on the body of knowledge that has been generated and that has ultimately been accepted as legitimate.

Put another way, sociology is the study of groups of people. The way people study people varies in different geographic locations and in different time frames. The calling together of this international group of researchers at Yunnan University provides us with a unique opportunity. We will have a chance to consider first-hand how the sociology of education, particularly the sociology of minority education, has developed in China and in the US since the early- to mid-1900s. (This is when the discipline of sociology began to come of age in both countries and when China’s ethnic minorities began being officially acknowledged by the government.) How will the research agenda of an international group of scholars, gathered together for the first time at Yunnan University, develop? How will decisions be made? And how might these decisions be influenced by the scholars’ countries of origin and the time frames in which they received their training?

Similar studies have been done on the discipline of sociology in South Africa, Korea and Mexico. Little has been written, however, from a sociology of knowledge perspective, about projects implemented in China.

2) Praxis. There is an almost universal recognition—and a decrying—of what has been called “academic imperialism” in the social sciences. Clearly an unfortunate relationship of inequality exists between the social sciences of the West and the social sciences of the remainder of the world. Consequently, there is a great need to develop alternative discourses in the social sciences. The “New Trends in Chinese Minority Education in the Globalized World” project is one small step in this direction. The project encourages greater interaction between scholars from two parts of the world, East and West, to jointly examine the universal problem of educational inequality for ethnic minorities. There will be successes and challenges in implementing what the project statement calls “going out” and “bringing in.” In our proposed paper we will explain to others, attempting similar international research collaborations, what seems to be working and what does not seem to be working to date. In order to do this, we will interview all of the participants and include this data in our paper. In addition, we as authors will be participant observers in the project. We will reflect upon what we would have done differently and what we would not change. This will aid us, as we receive feedback from other CIES conference participants, to plan our future research endeavors.

The impact of this project, either in the next three years or in the next thirty years, will be difficult to assess, other than in a preliminary way, by the time we present this paper. However, we as co-researchers, one an educator and the other a sociologist, are excited to be part of an international research collaboration that is developing between China and the US—and to have an opportunity to explain this process to others.

Authors

• Mei Wu, Research Institute of Higher Education, Yunnan University

• Maryjo Benton Lee, South Dakota State University