Empowering migrant children with social justice pursuit?: Teachers’ approaches to narrate inequalities issues in the classroom context

• In Event: Empowerment and Social Justice

Proposal

Despite the significant population of rural migrant children in China, the extant studies have well discovered that these children were experiencing various inequalities caused by their parents’ socioeconomic disadvantages in urban society and rural-urban differentiation in the urban public education system (Chen & Feng, 2013; Goodburn, 2020; Yu, 2020; Zhang, 2018). However, in the existing literature, how the schooling process interprets such inequality issues and develops these rural migrant children’s perception towards their experiences of inequalities is still under-researched (Yiu & Yu, 2022).

Scholars believe that the school facilitates a socialization process by teaching standards, cultural values, and norms important for the young to govern their behaviours as future adults in mainstream society (Feinberg & Soltis, 2004). Many conflict theorists have well explained how this socialization process in the schooling system contributes to the perpetuation of the advantaged position of the dominant class and the disadvantaged of the dominated one (Anyon, 2011; Apple, 1982; Lareau, 2011). Nevertheless, school education is also expected to shoulder the function of cultivating children’s critical perception of social problems and their pursuit of social justice. To meet this end, scholars argued, school education would embrace three visions of ‘good citizen’ valued and demanded in the main society – the personally responsible citizen, the participatory citizen, and the justice-oriented citizen – to help young people shape their relations with the surrounding society and form their social identity (Johnson & Morris, 2010; Westheimer & Kahne, 2004a, 2004b; Veugelers, 2007). The personally responsible citizen emphasizes the individualistic concept as individuals holding good manners, honesty, self-discipline, hard work, and responsibility for personal actions. Educators embracing the vision of participatory citizenship would emphasize the development of students’ capabilities and commitments to community-based affairs in their teaching practices, such as volunteering to support those in need (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004a; Johnson & Morris, 2010). However, as Veugelers (2007) argued, the participatory citizen still emphasizes individual participation in addressing social affairs, not the collective form. The justice-oriented citizen, also named as critical-democratic citizenship in Veugelers’ (2007) model, highlights one's social awareness of injustice issues and, more importantly, willingness to cooperate with others to pursue an agenda of change society for social justice (Westheimer & Kahne, 2004a). With this vision, school education would enable children to confront social problems and take the initiative for social changes by introducing critical pedagogy into the teaching agenda (Johnson & Morris, 2010).

Being inspired by this conceptual framework of ‘good citizen’ construction in the schooling process, the author intends to investigate how teachers in urban schools narrate their expectations for rural migrant children attending the school in a social dimension and how such constructed vision shapes teachers’ explanations and reactions to migrant children’s experienced inequalities in urban society. Moreover, this study adopts a comparative perspective by comparing the public school with the private migrant school to seek any possibilities of cultivating disadvantaged children’s beliefs in and pursuit of social justice.

This study is mainly drawn on the data gathered from two Beijing primary schools—one private migrant school (coded as HS) and one public school (coded as CS). Multiple data collection methods, including observations, interviews, and artefact review, were conducted in the two case schools. In this presentation, the analysis is primarily based on semi-structured interviews with 23 teachers and a review of learning materials of moral education used in both case schools.

Findings show that, despite the difference, teachers in both schools displayed similar emphases in cultivating students’ good manners, self-discipline, and social responsibility, which Westheimer and Kahne (2004a, 2004b) called essential characteristics of responsible and individualistic participatory citizenship. However, two case schools adopted different approaches to embracing perceived social inequalities issues related to migrant workers in school curricula. As indicated in this study, urban public schools purposefully legitimize rural migrants’ social inequalities to diminish social conflicts. In contrast, the private migrant school’s teachers were more active in discussing inequality issues in class. But unfortunately, the given classroom-based discussions were also dominated by the rural-urban differentiation discourse. Thus, labour issues were rarely addressed in the private migrant school either, saving for a few exceptions in the migrant school, as shown in the case of teacher Bo. Therefore, teachers in urban schools may be ill-prepared to address inequalities issues in their teaching which may further cause difficulties in empowering migrant children with the pursuit of social justice for themselves.

Author

• Jiaxin Chen, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University