Agentic Citizenship Learning in China: Official Curriculum and Student Agency

• In Event: Conceptions of citizenship and participation

Proposal

Abstract
Few studies in the field of citizenship education have sufficiently explored students’ learning of official CE curriculum content. The study investigated students’ responses to the CE curriculum content in a constrained social context taking an agency perspective. Drawing on qualitative data set in two high schools in China, the study revealed that the students learned the official content of the CE curriculum by deliberately determining what to be incorporated, reinterpreted, and resisted. The study recommends reconstructing the Chinese CE curriculum, the educational system, and the civic environment to nurture agentic citizens.
Keywords: China, citizenship learning, official curriculum, secondary education, student agency

Introduction
To inform CE policy, curriculum, and practice, it is important to have a detailed understanding of how students learn about citizenship. Studies in the area have increasingly adopted a social constructivist approach to understanding citizenship learning (e.g., Biesta et al., 2009; Fu, 2022; Haste, 2004; Rubin, 2007; Schulz et al., 2018). However, the mechanisms behind student’s learning of official CE curriculum content have not been sufficiently explored. To fill this gap, this study applies Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) agency theory to explain students’ citizenship learning. Their theory supplements the social constructivist approach by uncovering how the interplay of students’ multiple agentic orientations and contextual factors enable and constrain students’ responses to CE content.
This study, set in China, a country remarked by its contested civic environment and a high-stakes testing educational system. Although studies have investigated Chinese school-aged youths’ perceptions of citizenship (Li, 2018; Xiang et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2017), citizenship learning in schools (Law & Xu, 2017; Ye, 2019), and citizenship construction through online media (Fu, 2022), how students interact with official CE in China’s social context remains largely unexplored.
This study aims to investigate how Chinese high school students learn official CE content. The study is guided by two research questions: (1) what is the official citizenship discourse in Chinese textbooks? (2) how do Chinese students respond to the official CE and why?
Conceptual and Theoretical Framework
The study adopted Emirbayer and Mische’s agency theory to understand students’ interaction with official curriculum. The theory perceives agency as an actor’s ability to shape their responsiveness to contexts¬-for-action, suggesting that agency should be understood as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past, oriented toward the future, and acted out in the present. Research on citizenship learning can be enriched using Emirbayer and Mische’s theory by exploring how the interplay of learners’ multiple agentic orientations and their social environments shape students’ responses to official CE.
Method
This study employed a qualitative research method to capture the dynamics and complexity of CE learning. Data sources included national textbooks published by the People’s Education Press, classroom observations, and student and teacher interviews. The author observed 53 lessons from three teachers of the politics subject based on their voluntary participation (with informed consent). In addition, the author recruited 25 students (with parental consent) from the observed teachers’ classrooms to conduct semi-interviews. The author also interviewed the observed three teachers with each interview lasting about 60 minutes.
Findings
The findings showed students’ learning agency in response to high-stakes standardized testing and a prescribed official curriculum advocating regime support.
Being Rote-learners with Dissatisfaction
Initially, most students in the observed classes appeared to be passive rote-learners of CE, silently listening to teachers’ lecturing, memorizing textbook content, while seldom discussing political and social issues in the classroom, heavily constrained by the teachers’ strategy of teaching to the test. Nevertheless, some students expressed dissatisfaction and resisted rote learning by gently criticizing the textbook content and the forced memorization; in addition, they limited their time studying the subject.
Agentic Learning of Official Citizenship
Although much of the textbook content soon vanished from the students’ memories, it appeared that they selectively learned citizenship discourse, revealing their learning agency in determining what to be accepted, reinterpreted, and resisted.
Many students incorporated the textbooks’ responsibility discourse into their idea of citizenship. However, the students tended to address responsible behavior at the individual level rather than collectively submitting to the community and state’s interests, showing their learning agency by resisting certain textbook content.
Although the textbook’s discourse concerning rights is simplistic, students displayed considerable passion to learn about it, having rich interpretations beyond textbooks’ narratives. When asked what kinds of rights were important for citizens, students responded to this question by frequently mentioning rights related to voting, oversight of government actions, and freedom, highlighting the importance of rights for individual freedom and interests.
Students expressed a strong interest in learning about political participation. However, some cynical students distrusted the government and the official approaches. Students’ disengagement from official political participation is shaped by a pessimistic view of the future (i.e., political change is not possible) and a practical evaluation of the difficulties and ineffectiveness of political participation embedded in the Chinese political system.
Some students publicly resisted learning about the CCP’s socialist ideology. This resistance was displayed during classroom observations and interviews. Nevertheless, around half of the students were pragmatic and wanted to become CCP members.
Discussion and Conclusion
This study supplements research on Chinese students’ citizenship learning (e.g., Fairbrother, 2003; Law & Xu, 2017; Li, 2018; Liang, 2022; Zhao et al., 2017) by demonstrating and explaining how students manifest agency in their interactions with a mandatory curriculum. This study indicates that students’ selective responses to the CE content involved complex social actions shaped by the interplay of their multiple agentic orientations (including learning interests, political knowledge and experience, and practical-evaluation), teachers’ CE teaching strategy, high-stakes standardized testing, and China’s contested civic environment.
The study has important implications for CE policy, curriculum, and practice. It reminds policymakers and educators to examine which citizenship contents are valued and accepted by students, and which are resisted or rejected. Given the present stability of China’s political and educational structure, an urgent issue for Chinese scholars and educators is how to promote agentic citizens within China’s current educational system and political context.

Author

• Jia Jiang, College of Education,Zhejiang University