Highlighted session: Rethinking learning sites, communities, and what is educationally valuable in Amdo and Kham Tibetan regions

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

The panelists use empirical research to explore how Tibetans in the People’s Republic of China negotiate new political configurations, systems of informal schooling, and access to digital technology – all of which exert pressure on Tibetans who seek to avoid the extremes of assimilation and exclusion. The panelists present studies in which notions that are usually taken at face value by many educational researchers – culturally responsive pedagogy, educational technology, education policy, and cultural capital – are recast as multifaceted grounds of struggle rather than independent variables that help explain ‘student outcomes.’

Our first panelist presents an action research project in which the development of a private school’s new curriculum is driven by local perspectives on the tension among indigenous knowledges, cultural sustainability, and Tibetans’ access to employment and mobility in a Chinese society. The second panelist analyzes how digital technology, often accessed through smartphones, is experienced and navigated by Tibetan pastoralists for whom the Internet often represents a valuable learning avenue but one that usually leads away from Tibetan lifeworlds and towards Han Chinese and/or international media. The third panelist considers the utility of analyzing the effects of education policies on minoritized ethnic groups in particular administrative units when those contemporary divisions do not correspond to important indigenous linguistic or cultural groupings, by asking for example: Why does the relative underdevelopment of Tibetan medium education in Eastern Tibet of Kham appear to be so uniform and ubiquitous despite the fact that Kham Tibetan areas are administered under four Chinese provinces, all of which have very different educational policies? The fourth panelist challenges both taken-for-granted definitions of cultural capital (e.g. DiMaggio 1982) and those who argue for a greatly expanded notion of cultural capital (e.g. Yosso 2005) by arguing that what is educationally valued in Amdo Tibetan areas is, rather, deeply shaped by what is both ethnically desirable and politically feasible, respectively. This ethnographic case study is pursued at increasingly popular supplemental schools – sites that help shed light on formal education systems largely because they operate on the margins of it, where they are responsible for responding to the needs and goals created by the formal education system but have greater flexibility and autonomy in doing so.

All four papers attempt to raise the issue of sustainability of Tibetan culture and the study of it by focusing our work on the Tibetan communities outside of the Tibetan Autonomous Region (where about half of all Tibetans in the PRC live) or those that straddle its borders. We focus on Kham and Amdo Tibetan area that lie on the geographical and cultural margins of Chinese and Central Tibetan societies as they are often (hegemonically) envisioned with their centers in Beijing and Lhasa, respectively. Key sites in Amdo and Kham, where this research was conducted, though indeed ‘borderlands’ where numerous languages and peoples have interacted for centuries, are themselves cultural and intellectual centers that have often been able to exercise an actual autonomy and creativity that is stifled in the more politically sensitive and surveilled areas in central Tibet (Ch. Xizang) and more Han Chinese-dominated locations eastward. Situating our research here both helps reveal the limits of the kinds of educational practices and cultures that are possible for Tibetans working within an authoritarian Chinese state. It also decenters Lhasa as a synecdoche for all Tibetan experience, highlighting that important engines of cultural development have long existed outside the area that the Chinese state (and many Tibetans) have imagined to be the heartland of Tibetan culture. Moreover, our panel attempts to suggest a strategy for the sustainability of Tibetan Studies as a field itself: since the 1989 uprising in Lhasa and especially after the 2008 Olympic protests, conducting research in the Tibetan Autonomous Region has become evermore difficult for scholars not working with the Chinese government. And while unfortunate, these restrictions have encouraged researchers to pay closer attention to the three million Tibetans living outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region, breathing new life into questions ranging from Tibetan identity (e.g. Postiglione 2017) to grassland ecology (e.g. Bum 2018), all of which de-Orientalize the study of Tibet by challenging the conception of Tibet as an isolated, homogenous, and ahistorical polity.

Ultimately, this panel uses evidence from Tibetan areas to rethink concepts and approaches that that are often taken for granted in educational research. First, our panel begins with a direct exploration of how a culturally sustainable and indigenously informed pedagogy gets worked out in practice. We then move this conversation in three specific directions. Our second panelist asks: how does “foreign” and dominant culture-based media disrupt knowledge transmission in Tibetan pastoralist communities where learning has been conceptualized as spatially, temporally, and collectively situated? Our third panelist presents evidence that suggests contemporary administrative units in the PRC, though politically salient and perceived as legitimate by many, might not represent ideal units of analysis when trying to understand the differential acquisition of a minoritized language within a community of speakers. Analyzing whether such differences are due to different education policies, differing strategies for navigating formal schooling, the varying products of historical movements and hegemonies, or any of a number of other factors only becomes possible when contemporary provincial (and national) borders are decentered as the primary means for grouping peoples together and are instead analyzed as political configurations that disintegrate indigenous communities – sometimes deliberately so. And our final panelist presents evidence to argue that what knowledges and behaviors get counted as educationally valuable – even by those who strive for success in schooling – are not directly determined by what gets rewarded in formal school systems. Rather, by paying special attention to the field in which the drive for ethnically desirable and politically feasible positions exert pressure on actors, we can arrive at a more robust notion of cultural capital that attends to logics by which people minoritized in and through schooling build their strategies for succeeding in it. The issues that we raise in these cases shed light on local processes of globalized systems including schooling, technologizing human spaces, nation-state building.

Sub Unit

• SIG: Cultural Contexts of Education and Human Potential (CCEHP)

Individual Presentations

• Striving for sustainability of Tibetan social-cultural identity: A critical proposal from a private school in China - Jidme Gyaltsan, Ragya Nationalities Vocational School, Qinghai; Jia Luo, Yunnan Normal University

• Media and childhood: The impact of screen time on Tibetan pastoralist children’s non-formal learning in Amdo - Tsehuajab Washul, University of Virginia

• Tibetan regionality and educational divides: A survey study of Tibetan-medium schooling in Kham (Eastern Tibet) - Tashi Dekyid, University of Virginia

• Politically feasible and ethnically desirable: Supplemental schooling in Amdo Tibet and rethinking cultural capital - Andrew David Frankel, University of Virginia

Discussant

• Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Institute of International and Comparative Education, Beijing Normal University