Rural Education and Mass Migration, Policy and Impact in China

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

The roundtable presents cross-cutting themes of rural education which explore structural barriers to socially just development, the role of education and students’ and families’ engagement with both in the era of internal migration. Rural to urban migration has accelerated across the globe since 1960. From 2000 to 2020 the rural population shrank from 53% to 43% (World Bank online).
Rural education and communities in relation to the push-pulls of internal migration have not received adequate focus in comparative and international education. The last bibliography of 2015 of the CER listed only 2 titles with related keywords out of 4,300 references, UNESDOC listed a mere 7 articles, and the CIES 2024 proposal system totally lacks a "rural" keyword.
UNESCO as early as 2004 described the reality of the problem of rural education in its Newsletter headlined “Educating Rural People: A Low Priority,” editorializing on “the challenge of bringing education to rural people in the face of the widespread discrimination, witting and unwitting, against those living outside cities” (Daniel 2004, 1).
With this roundtable discussion, we will contribute to alleviation of the research need and the contextual problem of material neglect of rural education during internal migration. We explore the topics from conceptual, structural and person-centered approaches, using quantitative and qualitative methodologies.
The contributions deliberate issues of agency seized and exercised by marginalized and minoritized communities as they respond to the push-pull of urban migration. The session focuses on understudied regions, ethnicities and girls in China as they are engaged in primary through higher education. Given the breadth of the approaches and subject areas, implications can be drawn regarding post-educational trajectories for rural youth in the migration era which directly impact social cohesion. Although based on the particularity of contemporary Chinese environment, implications can be drawn for the migration and education project in many developing regions across the world.

Themes included are,
A. Rural schooling as Experienced by its students
1. Beyond hukou-based exclusion: Revisiting rural migrant parents’ active agency in educational involvement and impacts on their children’s educational trajectory
2. Comparative Study of Rural Migrant Technical-Vocational Education and Training of Female Students in Western China: Aspirations of Learning English
3. The Role of Vocational Schooling in the Empowerment of Ethnic Mongolian Girls in Western China
4. Shifting Narratives of Suzhi (Quality) and Suzhi Education: What Migrant and Rural children in China Tell Us about the Changing Nature of Chinese Education
B. Contextual Studies
1. Adolescent Romance in Rural China: Interactions Between Gender and Parenting
2. Reconceptualizing children’s welfare in migration era China
3. Equity and Access to Higher Education for Rural Uyghur Students in China: A consideration of policy and structural barriers
C. Conceptual Studies
1. The Inclusion Paradox: Why Inclusive Space Excludes Migrant Children, and Vice Versa
2. Do China’s Rural Migrant Workers Constitute a Caste?

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Book Launch

Chair

• Min Yu, Wayne State University

Book Launch Presenters

• Jennifer H Adams, Johns Hopkins University, School of Education

• Jingjing Lou, Beloit College

• Rebecca A Clothey, Drexel University

• Yu Li, University of Montana Western

• Jiaxin Chen, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

• Fangsheng Zhu, Duke Kunshan University

• Ya Na, Kent State University

• Peggy Kong, Drexel University School of Education

Non-presenting author

• Xinwei Zhang, Yale University

• Xiaoran Yu, Citrus College

• Damian Wyman, Lehigh University

Discussant

• Vilma Seeberg, Kent State University