Reinforcing and resisting: the complex supplemental practices in Amdo Tibetan shadow education

• In Event: Making the learner, making the teacher, and their ambivalences

Proposal

INTRODUCTION
This research explores how Amdo Tibetan educators in China negotiate the increasing influence that formal education exerts on the organization of society and the concomitant widespread perception of the legitimacy of schooling to exert this influence. This ‘Education Revolution’ has created new opportunities for social mobility and the actualization of human potential (Fiala & Lanford 1987; Baker 2014). But it has also increased the capacity of schooling to legitimize and reward some knowledges and behaviors, while devaluing and marginalizing others (Apple 1993). To help students navigate this process, many educators provide instruction ‘outside school time’ (OST) that attempts to improve what students achieve through mainstream schooling (Suter 2016). Such activities are often thought to “shadow” mainstream schooling (Mori & Baker 2010); but leading scholars appear to be interested in them only insofar as they are strictly “academic [and] supplementary,” bypassing OST programs that deliver curricula not taught and tested in mainstream schools (Bray 2017:472).

CONTEXT
Of the diverse efforts devised to navigate potentially detrimental educational circumstances, Tibetan OST programs are vital to understand because, since its 12th century renaissance, Tibetans experienced what could be called their own ‘Education Revolution,’ which precipitated the reorganization of the state and society, and many individuals’ aspirations and beliefs, around educational institutions and their values. Consequentially, seeking out additional teachings, outside of normal periods of instruction, from more or less institutionally-based teachers, has been normative for centuries in Tibet (Jinpa 2019). A case study at a Tibetan OST program can therefore complicate assumptions, made by both proponents of the Education Revolution as well as Chinese state policies (from different angles, cf. Baker 2014 and Li et al. 1997) that formal schooling expanded into societies, like Tibet, that were putatively devoid of institutions of mass education, initiatives that supplemented them, and populations who recognized the value of these.

RESEARCH QUESTION, METHODS, THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
To interrogate the strategies that characterize negotiating what is worth learning and how to achieve it outside of mainstream schools, I asked: How do the educators at “MT Supplemental School” conceptualize and inculcate what is educationally valuable? I approach this question through two sub-questions: 1) What kind(s) of students does MT try to create and how? I then ask 2) What cultural capital is produced at MT and how is it transmitted to students?

Ethnographic methods were best suited to answering the research questions. Data were collected between 4/2018 and 12/2019, totaling 101 interviews (with educators, students, and parents) and 85 days of participant observation, the majority of which (48 interviews; 51 days of observation) were conducted at MT. In observing teacher-student interactions both inside and outside the classroom, I focused particularly on what behaviors and knowledges were rewarded or punished by teachers. Interviews elicited educators’ frameworks for how they determined what was useful to learn. I also used textual/visual evidence, such as program advertisements and state policy briefs, to triangulate ethnographic data.

The first sub-question investigates the processes and goals of MT and situates these within the global emergence of OST instruction, often called “shadow” education for the way it is thought to mimic the curricula and forms of formal schools (Stevenson & Baker 1992). This term suggests that OST education is necessarily supplemental, and responds only to needs created by formal schooling (Mori and Baker 2010:36). Some even assert that supplemental education only “exists because of the existence of formal education” (Zhang 2014:436). By this logic, one could predict only the emergence of OST programs that strive exclusively to improve the “lagging” scores Tibetan students obtain in mainstream schools compared to national averages (Dolma 2014). However, If OST programs offer instruction in ‘mainstream’ curriculum as well as content not tested in mainstream schools, it is necessary to reconsider the capacity for these programs to fulfill several – and sometimes ostensibly competing – goals virtually simultaneously.

The second sub-question focuses on the nature of capital (Bourdieu 1986). Numerous studies in the sociology of education have used cultural capital to understand educational stratification and the reproduction of inequality (Davies & Rizk 2017), but questions about the salience of cultural capital remain (cf. DiMaggio & Mohr 1985 and Kingston 2001). This may be because many studies are insensitive to the fact that what constitutes valuable capital depends on the dynamics of a specific field (Naidoo 2004). My second sub-question reconsiders what constitutes capital in settings where dominant cultural capital exists alongside what Carter (2005) calls non-dominant capital, which may nevertheless be valued by institutions with considerable social power and wealth, such as the monastery.

Synthesizing these questions first sheds light on the nature of the overlapping fields (Grenfell 2009) in which Amdo Tibetans compete for success and status. Answering the principal question will then refine neoinstitutional and cultural capital theories attempting to explain what happens in educational interactions that exist outside mainstream schooling but nevertheless affect outcomes achieved therein.

FINDINGS
Findings from my principal field site, MT, show that OST programs, like all ‘loosely coupled systems’ (Weick 1976), comprise several elements that can function relatively independently. My analysis reveals the multivalent and complex strategies educators use to negotiate the linguistic and cultural minoritization Tibetans face in mainstream schooling while still preparing students to succeed therein. While some activities at MT directly reinforce what is learned in mainstream schooling, sometimes it is reframed, disputed, or even ignored. Students at MT also obtain academically valuable skills and dispositions through channels that may be less accessible in mainstream schooling, like becoming friends with a young teacher qua role model (see Lareau 2015). This suggests that it is sometimes through deviating from mainstream norms that OST programs can best support their students. Through an analysis of educators’ strategic ‘coupling’ or ‘decoupling’ (Bastedo 2004) from the methods and meanings dominant in mainstream school, I also explore the possibility that OST programs, largely due to the legitimacy accorded to organized educational endeavors (Baker 2014), remain an efficacious platform from which to challenge the hegemony of the education system they are thought to supplement.

Author

• Andrew David Frankel, University of Virginia