Outside Curriculum of Migrant Children in China

• In Event: Outside Curriculum—Necessary for Public Education: Dreaming Possibilities, Starting With China

Abstract

Presenter 2 also grew up in China and taught school in migrant communities which she studied via critical ethnography. She pursued doctoral studies in the US, where she is now a university faculty member. She will discuss how experiences in the lives of Chinese migrant workers shape perspectives that their children bring to school, and will place special emphasis on the kinds of schooling migrant workers create for their children. A key point will be that this ethnography reveals the public taking stock of their outside curriculum, without naming it as such, and constructing schools that fit needs and interests derived from it. Thus, it speaks directly to the need for involvement of publics to be educated in addressing what is worthwhile for them. To illustrate this, the presenter will address how migrant children schools reflect the messages of outside curriculum more fully than do schools designed by the corporate state, in view of the fact that migrant schools studied focused on providing directly for the well-being, employment, human or social rights of students and their community through collective action.

When migrant workers or ethnic minorities (focused on by Presenter 1) or scholars empathic with them originally presented with the idea of outside curriculum, the idea was suggested that they might consider the impact of selected dimensions of outside curriculum by applying major sets of analytic categories of school curriculum to conceptualize outside curriculum. Illustratively, one might build on the Tyler rationale by identifying a key idea or skill or disposition learned in migrant experience, then state its purpose, observe and record experiences that teach and reinforce it, note how the learning is organized relative to scope, sequence, or environmental arrangement, and comprehend how it is evaluated. Similarly, using Schwab’s curricular commonplaces, a researcher of migrant life might ask how each of the commonplaces (teachers, learners, subject matter, and milieu) affect the others in some dimension of the life of a student or group of students. Of course, one would have to decide who or what were teachers, subject matter, learners, and milieu in the dimension selected for study. Responses of participants indicated that these analytic categories were not appropriate to the complexities or nuances of situations, and that categories for considering outside curriculum would need to be derived from the setting. Oftentimes, such categories needed to expose inequities in ethnicity, class, gender, and power. Moreover, such exposure might be highly dangerous.

Author

• Min Yu, Wayne State University