Shame and love in a city high school: Understanding Chinese rural students' narratives of critical world making

Abstract

In this Narrative Inquiry, we share the stories of three Chinese rural students who grew up in a southeastern county in China before moving to the county seat for high school. By inviting our participants to read their own life, we aimed to understand how Chinese rural students make sense of their experience in an exam‐centered school system that seemed to offer them opportunities of upward social mobility but at the same time perpetuated the mindset of rural deficiency. Data analysis shows that the visceral feelings of shame and love played an important role in our participants' critical consciousness about school, allowing them to work within and against school norms to transform a strictly stratified school space. We argue that marginalized youth's storytelling can become a practice of critical literacy, enabling them to construct critical meaning makings in embodied ways.

“The Statue of Venus with a Broken Arm Shows Us the Beauty of Incompleteness”: University Student Diversity and Experience in Chinese Well-Being and Mental Health Education Textbooks

“…In different languages and parts of the world, adolescence does not necessarily correspond to the same age group [43]. It should be noted here that, for most Chinese students, going to university represents the first time for them to be away from home, from the care of parents and the somewhat protected environment of a primary/secondary school (see [44] about rural and urban high school students in a south-eastern county of China). Questions about self-identity are of course considered by students before entering university, but being by themselves, encountering people who might be very different (university students come from very different parts of China, and might speak a different dialect and have, e.g., different eating habits), the confrontation with this 'difference in similarity' will trigger a lot of self-questioning (see [13,45]).…”

“…In this analytical subsection, we examine some of the stories of change experienced during the transition to higher education, as discussed by the textbook authors. These stories of change relate to the transition from high school to university, e.g., moving from a small rural place to a larger city, having to adapt to different climates when moving from the South of China to the North as well as pedagogical differences (see [44]). One important aspect highlighted by the textbook authors has to do with the lack of attention and control concerning all aspects of life and education at university.…”