Unequal Learning: Education and Inequality in Contemporary China and Beyond
1322 School of Education Building (Tribute Room)
About the speaker: Xin Xiang is an assistant professor at Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai. She obtained a B.A. in psychology and Ph.D. in education from Harvard University. Prior to BNU, she served as the Dean's Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Education at HGSE. Her research focuses on understanding and transforming educational inequality in contemporary China as well as coloniality in global knowledge production. In 2009, she co-founded Clover Youth, a Guangzhou-based nonprofit organization that aims to empower migrant youth to build dignified and meaningful livelihoods. She continues to lead the organization alongside her academic career.
Unequal Learning takes reader inside four schools and communities across China’s socioeconomic spectrum: a rural school hidden among tall mountains, a public school in an emerging city in an impoverished region, a low-cost private school serving rural migrants, and a prestigious metropolitan public school attracting the children of elite professionals and government officials in a prosperous metropolis.
Narratives of children’s day-to-day activities will be connected to the underlying paradigms of learning they reveal, as well as the larger economic, political, and social structures that enable and constrain each paradigm of learning.
Sponsored by: the Combined Program in Educational Studies, the Marsal School Educational Studies program, and the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, all from the University of Michigan.