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Session Submission Summary

Cultivating Purpose in Life Among Students in Rural Areas in China

Wed, February 22, 3:15 to 4:45pm EST (3:15 to 4:45pm EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Constitution Level (3B), Cabin John

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Objectives of the Session
Purpose plays a key role in one's personal growth (Benson, 2006) and particularly psychological well-being ( French & Joseph, 1999). The 21st century has seen the Chinese government paying more and more attention to education, with 4.22% of the national GDP spent on public education in 2021, up from 2.87% in 2000 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2021). As students’ basic physical needs are met (textbooks, classrooms, etc), disparities in access to quality education continue to hinder social equality. For the vast majority of the student population in China, the more disadvantaged their schools are, the more likely they get test-based education rather than opportunities and horizons for a meaningful life(Yang, 2015), and consequently confusion of self-determination and a lack of purpose in adulthood(Jiang, 2013). What can educational administrators, researchers, and teachers do to empower youth in their seek of purpose? Corresponding to the annual call of sub-theme III: school systems and educators to improve learning and teaching in formal or informal settings, this symposium showcases a nationwide supplemental program by Alpha Foundation (pseudonym), code-named“Dream Education.” It interprets how researchers and practitioners collaborate to cultivate youth purpose via systematic organization, curriculum development, instructional design, and outcome assessment, not at a school level but more broadly at a county level.

Overview of the Presentation
This symposium presents a picture of how the “Dream Education” is envisaged, structured, implemented, and validated based on theoretical and empirical research and large-scale implementation. The panel includes youth development researchers, curriculum designers and developers, implementation administrators, and practitioners, in addition to curriculum evaluators, who collaboratively lead, execute, and monitor the whole program. Specifically, we seek to answer our research questions by tackling the following issues: How can we go about building lifelong learning opportunities that are socially and ethically just, environmentally conscious, globally oriented, and based on empirical and observational methodological and theoretical approaches?
Paper 1 is a cross-sectional study that through more than 800 quantitative and qualitative data reflects the purpose status, developmental patterns, and other factors affecting children and adolescents (grades 5-12) in rural areas of China. The survey highlights the urgency and necessity of purpose education for rural students.
Paper 2 is a study of the institutional design and policy-making of the “Alpha Foundation” to showcase how far a nonprofit could have gone in initiating organizational changes in classrooms and curriculum systems, teacher preparation, and independent evaluation to serve disadvantaged rural students to the extent they could have a longstanding purpose in education and do that in a more effective manner.
Paper 3 elaborates on the educational philosophy of “Dream Education,” the conceptual model and forces driving the formation of purpose, by taking the course example of “Dream Journey”. Empirical evidence, substantially dating back nearly a decade, laid solid ground in the argument of cultivating a ‘purpose’ ability among rural students.
Paper 4 uses the quasi-experimental method to examine data of students from 35 schools within a county to see how "Dream Curricula" boosts student competence in seeking their personal dreams. It sheds light on subsequent intervention design and adjustments necessary for purpose education.
Both theoretical deliberation and empirical evidence inform papers in the symposium. Data sources include classroom observations, interviews, narratives, quantitative surveys and experiments, and texts and documents.

Scholarly significance
Papers in this symposium address the cultivation of purpose and aspiration among students from rural China. These papers draw on theoretical findings of organizational effectiveness (Decker, Mayer, & Glazerman, 2004), positive psychology (Seligman, 2012), self-identity theories (Marcia, 1964), and cultural modeling (Lee, 2001). Researchers and practitioners in this panel collaborate to present how to provide large-scale evidence-based and equity-oriented educational programs with institutional design, curriculum systems, instructional models, and appropriate assessment. What’s so special about it in China is that it’s carried out not by the all-mighty government, but by a grass-root charity. It tells a lot about how to complement orthodox education with collaboratively innovative so that educational equity would eventually take hold.
Such a China case also contributes to the international dialogue on student purposes while keeping track of the aspirations of different stakeholders.

Structure
The session will begin with a 10-minute introduction to the symposium. Then, the authors of each paper will have 15 minutes to discuss the most relevant and essential findings and implications of their work. Panelists will have approximately 20 minutes to comment. The rest of the session goes for interactions with the audience.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations