Session Information
23 SES 04 B, Refugees, Solidarity and the Politics of Education in Europe
Paper Session
Contribution
Research background
While some parts of Europe are experiencing the population transition of the arrival of ‘people from more varied national, ethnic, linguistic and religious backgrounds’ (Meissner and Vertovec, 2014: 542), China is experiencing a population transition of internal migration. In China, during the last three decades of urbanization, millions of rural labourers have left their hometowns and come to work in the urban areas. They do not hold a household registration (Hukou) in the places where they are working in, and many of them belong to low-income groups. Their children have encountered many difficulties accessing free compulsory education in urban state schools. For example, in state primary/secondary school recruitment, the schools give first priority to children with local household registration card. And most of the migrant parents cannot afford to send their children to private schools. Facing this problem, the central government promulgated a policy in 2001 stating that ‘the destination local government and state schools should be the mainstream channels for recruiting migrant children in compulsory education stage’. In order to achieve this goal, the destination local governments set up loose state school enrolment criteria towards migrant children. However, the loose state school enrolment criteria changed since 2012. In some cities, governments started to set up more strict state school enrolment criteria for migrant children. The drastic policy change has caused hardships to many migrant families. As a result, many migrant children have to go back to their parents’ hometown to study, or to stay in the city and enroll in unregistered and informal private schools.
Research question and objective
Why has the policy of migrant children’s state school enrolment criteria changed since 2012? What is the nature of the changed criteria system? What are the consequences of this change? Using Foucauldian theoretical resources, this research aims at exploring the discursive formation of the state school enrolment criteria policy after 2012 to reveal the inseparable nature of ‘knowledge/power’ within this policy, and eventually, reveal the source of migrant group’s hardship in state school enrolment in China. The findings of this paper might also have some implications for the research of migrant education in Europe, since migrant children’s school enrolment can also be an issue in some parts of Europe.
Theoretical framework
Foucault (2002) has put forward the concept of discourse, which helps us to reveal how our understanding of things is constructed through the conjunction of knowledge/power. Yet he did not apply it to educational policy studies. Policy sociology, which adopts Foucault as one of the major theoretical resources, has innovatively conceptualized policy as discourse to deconstruct the power/knowledge configurations of policy (Ball, 1990, 1994). Policy sociology has also re-conceptualized the policy trajectory as ‘policy cycle’ (Bowe, Ball and Gold, 1992), which contains three coexisting and permeable contexts: context of influence, context of policy text production and context of practice. The ‘policy cycle’ provides ‘a mechanism for linking and tracing the discursive origins and possibilities of policy, as well as the intentions embedded in, responses to and effects of policy’ (Ball, 1994: 26). However, while creating a space for policy discourse analysis, the ‘policy cycle’ framework still needs to be complemented by other theoretical resources to strengthen its explanatory power for the discursive formation of educational policy. Then the contribution of ‘policy archaeology’ (Scheurich, 1994), which explores four arenas in the discursive formation of educational policy, meets this need. Integrating the above Foucauldian theoretical resources, this paper puts forward an updated version of ‘policy cycle’ framework to analyze the discursive formation of ‘education as social welfare’ in Chinese migrant children’s state school enrolment criteria policy.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Ball, S. J. (1994) Education Reform: A Critical and Post-structural Approach, Buckingham: Open University Press. Ball, S. J. (1990) Politics and Policy Making in Education: Explorations in Policy Sociology, London: Routledge. Bowe, R., Ball, S. J., and Gold, A. (1992) Reforming Education and Changing School, London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2002) The Archaeology of Knowledge, London; New York: Routledge. Meissner, F. and Vertovec, S. (2014) ‘Comparing super-diversity’. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(4): 541-555. Scheurich, J. (1994) ‘Policy archaeology: a new policy studies methodology’, Journal of Education Policy, 9(4): 297-316.
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