A Narrative Inquiry into the Experience of Being a Beginning Teacher in Rural China

• In Event: Poster session I
  In Poster Session: Poster session 1

Proposal

This presentation will use narrative inquiry to explore the experience of being rural beginning teachers in China. By exploring the rural teachers’ thoughts, memories, perceptions and emotions, this research aims to deepen people’s understanding of Chinese rural beginning teachers.

Over the past 30 years, under the development ideology of urbanization, industrialization, and modernization, Chinese government’s financial priority is in urban education, which resulted in the considerable disparity between urban and rural education. For the sustainability of Chinese society, achieving educational equality is now an important goal of China. Better understanding rural teachers and improving rural education are key to promoting Chinese educational equality. Since currently there is a decreasing number of rural beginning teachers (An, 2018), this research will “give voice” to them to facilitate their development and to narrow the urban-rural gap.

Pinar’s (2012) theory of currere is applied as the theoretical framework in this research. Currere (Pinar, 2012) is a term that suggests the educators to do an autobiographical reflection on their educational experiences so as to deepen their self-understanding in society. Currere suggests that teachers’ past, present and future are closely connected and influence each other. Teachers can follow the four steps: the regressive, the progressive, the analytical, and the synthetic to reflect their past, present and future. Under the framework of Currere, a comprehensive understanding of rural beginning teachers can be obtained.

This research takes the methodology of narrative inquiry (Riessman, 2008). Narrative inquiry believes that people make sense of their lives through story-telling. In this research, what the teachers tell and how they tell can reflect their understanding of their experiences and identities. I collected data by two methods: interviews, and the artful inquiry method. After recruiting four rural beginning teachers from a village in China, I took three face-to-face interviews of each participant to ask about their lived experience. Furthermore, artful inquiry activities (self-story writing, “photo voice” and drawing) were applied to better elicit these teachers’ stories. After transcribing and translating the recordings, four kinds of narrative analysis: thematic analysis, structural analysis, dialogic analysis and visual analysis (Risseman, 2008) were applied.

After thematic analysis, three themes emerged. Firstly, “stability” is the main reason why these teachers chose to teach in rural schools. Secondly, “tired” is the most prominent feeling of being a rural beginning teacher. Lastly, these beginning teachers are eager to leave rural schools. Also, after the detailed structural, dialogic and visual analysis, the result shows that these teachers have a conflicted feeling of being responsible and being eager to leave.

Even though there are already some studies focusing on Chinese rural education (Xu & law, 2015), none of them explore the fecundity of rural teachers’ experience. Moreover, other studies focus only on North American context (Olson and Osborne,1991). By creating a space for Chinese rural beginning teachers to talk about their stories, to discuss their dilemmas and to express their feelings, this study will fill in the gap and will help facilitate a long-term development of China.

Author

• Shanshan Hua, McGill University