Unequal Learning: Education and Society in Contemporary China

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

Based on Xiang’s dissertation that won the Gail P. Kelly Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation in 2020, Unequal Learning takes reader inside four schools and communities across China’s socioeconomic spectrum: a rural school hidden amongst tall mountains, a public school in an emerging city in an impoverished region, a low-cost private school serving rural migrants and a prestigious metropolitan public school attracting the children of elite professionals and government officials in a prosperous metropolis.

In these diverse communities, Xiang identifies four distinct paradigms of learning that exist in most modern societies across the globe: Learning in Family and Communal Endeavours, Learning through Formal Instruction, Learning in Organized Activities, and Learning through Play. Weaving global histories into riveting narratives about children’s day-to-day activities, Xiang elegantly unpacks the economic, political and social structures that enable and constrain each paradigm of learning, as well as how each paradigm of learning plays out differently across the socioeconomic spectrum. The differentiation of Learning through Formal Instruction across social classes and the exclusivity of Learning in Organized Activities results from and contributes to the widening gulf between the globally-oriented metropolitan elites and the popular classes in China. At the same time, the systematic devaluation of Learning in Family and Communal Endeavours reflects and reinforces the devaluation of human labour in global capitalism.

Though the empirical research was conducted in four particular communities in China, the relevance of her analysis and arguments extends far beyond these communities and the Chinese borders. As Kuan-Hsing Chen (2010) writes, “to study a place anywhere on earth, be it India, Ethiopia, Palestine, or Brazil, is simply one route toward an understanding of world history. To understand any place is a way to understand an aspect of the contemporary world” (p. 253). Xiang leans into the paradigm of learning framework as well as comparisons with ethnographic research across the globe to make visible the global histories obscured by the essentialist East-West duality and methodological nationalism baked into mainstream discourses. Moreover, the paradigm of learning framework provides a powerful tool to make sense of educational inequality in modern societies, which is far deeper and more complex than a number of intersecting achievement and attainment gaps. Revealing the how learning is intertwined with structures of power, Xiang argues that any tenable vision of educational equity or justice requires fundamentally rethinking whose knowledge and contribution counts as well as what good schools and good education look like.

Sub Unit

• Book launches and Workshops / Book Launch

Chair

• Jun Teng, 1.Beijing Normal University

Book Launch Presenter

• Xin Xiang, Beijing Normal University

Discussants

• Swati Puri, Harvard University Graduate School of Education

• jingjing lou, Beloit College

• Min Yu, Wayne State University