Minority education in China : institutional practices and individual trajectories

Abstract

This study empirically examines the discursive construction of ethnicity in situated social practices in the educational space, investigating how ethnic majority and ethnic minority are constructed into dichotomized labels and how this divide is made institutionally meaningful. The research was conducted in Caiyun Minority School, a senior secondary minority school located in an ethnically diverse city in southwestern China. The focal school serves as an illustrative case of the implementation of minority education policies, a condition shaped by the school's historically inherited status as the state-designated space for the education of ethnic minorities. In investigating the school's discursive positioning vis-à-vis national policies as well as individual students' identity construction and academic development, this study offers further feedbacks to the Chinese literature on the ideological construction of ethnicity within the logic of the educational field. The exploration of the discursive construction of institution and identity is articulated through an integrated theoretical framework that combines ontological and epistemological underpinnings drawn from the traditions of linguistic ethnography and critical sociolinguistic ethnography. A nine-month ethnographic fieldwork was conducted. The data collection process focused on examining the construction of the institutional discursive space of minority education, students' situated construction of ethnicity and the academic and identity trajectories of three students who were officially categorized as ethnic minority. Analysis shows that minority education at the school was constructed into a distinct discursive space that reproduced the dichotomy between ethnic minority and majority. At the same time, a detailed look at the school's daily practices and individual students' trajectories highlights that realities were much more complicated than what was being presented in the institutional discourses. Situated in the intersection of the discourses of minority education and academic competition, both the school and students were mobilizing available discourses to fulfill a variety of goals. While the school adopted the discourse of minority education as an added value to help it stand out in intense inter-school academic competition, students exhibited diversified forms of positioning vis-à-vis institutional discourses for creative identity construction, a process that also reproduced and reshaped conventional norms and expectations in the school. Taken together, these findings suggest that, although the "state-designated minority school" label and ethnic classifications are institutional realities that need to be reckoned with, they do not serve as transparent windows into situated practices on the ground. The point emphasized here is that concepts such as ethnicity, culture and identity need to be investigated in situated practices, to do justice to the multiplicity of meanings generated by individuals in their moment-to-moment social lives. Finally, this thesis suggests some directions for future research, with regard to obtaining a better understanding of the politics of identity in China and the dilemmas, opportunities and challenges met by schools, teachers and students situated in the discourse of minority education.