Research on the role of teacher agency has been growing significantly during the last decade. Agentic teachers act purposefully and constructively to direct their professional development and contribute to the quality of education, especially in rural areas. Professional development is mutually constituted between teachers and socio-cultural…

Teachers' retention plays a critical role in rural students' access to quality education. Previous studies on rural teacher turnover have emphasised the role of economic disadvantages, with little attention paid to non-economic factors. The present study examined the effects of teacher-community interactions and community social structure on rural…

Since the expansion of higher education, many rural students in China managed to enter urban universities. However, migrating across layers of structural constraints, those rural students faced dramatic transitions and challenges in the urban university. Drawing upon 50 rural students' narratives about their educational trajectories, I find that…

This paper explores how English language has gradually become a linguistic form of cultural capital in China's zigzag journey to modernization. It situates English's status in flux in historical context, with an analysis at both the international and intra-national level. It showcases the necessity to embed cultural capital within Bourdieu's full…

Research on identity in teacher education and professionalism has been a significant issue for language teacher educators in terms of their trajectories and career development. Examining identity from contextual perspectives can assist teachers in establishing a professional self in order to facilitate them to better understand and negotiate their…

This paper studies the current differences in educational expectations between urban and rural students and explores the mechanism from the individual/family and school/society perspectives. The results show significant differences in expectations between rural and urban junior high school students for going on to higher education. In addition,…

This study explores how physics teachers in a high school negotiate the relationships between individual and collective agencies in the context of the on-going curriculum reform in China. Drawing on Bandura's social cognitive theory, the study employs ethnographical methods including observation, interviewing, and the researcher's and teachers'…

Based on the findings of the China General Social Survey, this study aims to analyze the trend of the intergenerational mobility in China since the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy by evaluating the absolute and relative mobility rates through the mobility table. The intergenerational mobility level in China is relatively high…

The recent revival of Confucianism in the PRC raises questions regarding the legitimacy of cultivating Confucian virtues such as "ren" ([Chinese characters omitted] benevolence), "li" ([Chinese characters omitted] propriety) and "xiao" ([Chinese characters omitted] "filial piety" or "family…

The aim behind this article is to clear up some misunderstandings about British and Chinese education approaches in the popular BBC documentary "Are our kids tough enough: Chinese Schools". The article evaluates the differences in academic performance, class disciplines and education values of two education practices that have caused…

Based on the data collected in a one-year long fieldwork in Zhong, a county located in middle part of China, this article reconsiders the concept of "useless schooling," which was proposed in recent studies on the perceptions of value of education among lower-class rural residents in China. It calls for a understanding of those changes…

This case study investigates how a cohort of Myanmar ethnic minority students' language ideologies shape their Putonghua learning and educational trajectories at government schools and Chinese supplementary schools in the borderland next to China. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and from the participants' autobiographies…

This study selected 10 rural children who attended undergraduate programs at 211/985 universities as its research subjects, for analysis of the underlying reasons behind their achievement of higher educational attainment. The study found that the principal reasons were as follows: First, escaping a rural area and repaying their parents were…

This study provides an approach to teaching and learning in the international business (IB) classroom about cultural values, beliefs, attitudes, and norms through the study of cultural metaphor. The methodology is based on established qualitative methods by using participants' visual pictures and written explanations--representative of their…

Previous research has encouraged a cultural specific framework to be developed through research in Asian countries, such as China, to help internationalize the findings and help athletes to adapt them to their society and culture. Based on a socioecological framework, this study investigated how social-ecological determinants affect elite student…