Poster #179 - The Rise of Chinese Rural Preschools: A Visual Ethnographic Study

• In Event: 1-169 - Poster Session 04
  In Poster Session: PS 04 Section - Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Integrative Statement

In China, a series of Three-Year Preschool Education Action Plans have been instituted since 2011 to attack a dual predicament: low provision and high cost. One grand goal was to bring the national gross enrollment rate from 62.3% in 2011 to 85% in 2020. The common belief is that the attainment of this goal depends on rural development. Although rural preschoolers make up nearly one half of the Chinese preschool-age population, preschool has been scarce in the rural areas of China (UNICEF, 2017).
However, policy experts and urban educators have questioned whether this goal is attainable given that China’s GDP per capita is barely one-fourth of that in OECD countries (World Bank Group, 2016). Experts and the general public express the concern that the peak birth rate following the new two-children-per-family policy will hold back the enrollment stride (Meng, 2018). Other than prevalence statistics, there has been little research on the development of Chinese rural preschools.
Taking preschool enrollment as an entry point, we set out to answer an open research question: Do rural preschool practitioners and parents perceive any change in preschool provision and cost of attendance in their experiences?
This study was conducted in two counties, one in Gansu Province and one in Guizhou Province. The two counties are “poverty-stricken” as assessed by the state; neither county had a full-fledged rural preschool before 1990. We used a visual ethnography approach to interview informants about the photos they kept from the early days of the preschools’ existence, to contextualize various issues surrounding enrollment.
A total of 463 photos were collected, 354 in one county and 109 in the other. These photos facilitated and anchored our interviews with 25 people who told us what has changed and what has not in preschool education, highlighting the growth in enrollment. We used four techniques: (1) selecting focal images to generate our own questions; (2) inviting informants to offer their choice of photos to focus on; (3) reviewing photos with informants for clarifications; and (4) sharing photos with other participants. A set of basic questions allowed us to follow informants’ answers and derive new questions to seek their explanations about the images from the past.
The participants described a great deal of recent change. Surprisingly, informants told us that the enrollment in their local preschools was already above 90%, thanks to the Three-Year Action Plans. They reported that low-income families had tuition and meals covered by the government. Almost all the villages have had a new or renovated preschool facility since 2010, with full-fledged age-graded services accessible to all families. Preschool staff explained that, in recent years, parents’ demand and support grew steadily for early care and education, owning to societal and technological advancement. These and other findings raised different issues from those that dominate the general discourse. We will discuss the tensions the rural informants presented, especially their serious concerns about the diverse needs for local preschool improvement, through the lens of Rogoff’s (2003) theory of cultural community practice.

Authors

• Yeh Hsueh, University of Memphis
  Presenting Author

• Jun Hao, The University of Memphis
  Non-Presenting Author