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The making of ‘incompetent parents’: intersectional identity, habitus and Chinese rural migrant’s parental educational involvement

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Abstract

This paper extends existing Bourdieusian theorisations of the educational involvement of working-class parents by adding the less-examined axes of rural origin and migration status with an intersectional approach. It focusses on the ‘labourer’ families involved in internal rural–urban migration in China. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Beijing and Shanghai with 32 migrant parents, teachers and head teachers. It examines how the intersection of rural origin, migration status and working-class identities shapes the parents’ habitus and their exertion of capital in the urban education field. The findings show that the intersection of two aspects of their habitus—one, resulting from their rural background, leads them not to treat themselves as academic educators, and a second, arising from their migrant working-class status, the necessity to ‘strive for survival’. Since the parents’ actions do not match with the teachers’ expectations of home-school cooperation, they are identified as ‘incompetent’.

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Notes

  1. According to the authors, guanxi is ‘a special Chinese idiom of social networks that entangles inevitably the other components of Chinese sociality’ (Xie and Postiglione 2016, 1016)

  2. Bourdieu himself seldom refers to the concept of class in his work, neither does he ‘offer a typology of classes to compete with others on the academic market’ (Crossley 2012, 85). Yet Bourdieusian-informed researchers have adopted Bourdieu’s concepts to theorise social positionality through a social class framework. Examining the Chinese context, Lu (2002) outlines ten occupational categories which are then classified into five social classes, based on people’s occupations and their organisational, economic and cultural resources. Limited in different (or all) types of resources, the rural migrant labourer in my study, such as service sector employees, industrial labourers and agricultural labourers, are positioned in the two bottom levels in the social structure, resonating with the concept of working-class in Western societies.

  3. I gave them broad criteria for recommending headteachers and their schools, which should be for those of compulsory education age and have some migrant children as pupils

  4. In China, the household registration (hukou) system is a unique population administration system. The hukou card is used as a credential with which people can enjoy a series of social welfare provisions (e.g. health care, education, subsides, etc.) in the place where they are registered.

  5. The ‘one child’ policy was implemented successfully in cities. Rural residents are allowed to give birth to a second child if their first child is not a boy, in order to guarantee the supply of agricultural labour.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Carol Vincent, Professor Louise Archer, Professor Pat Thomson and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the drafts of this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science [Grant Number GD18YJY02], and by Guangzhou Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science [grant number 2019GZYB33].

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  1. School of Education, South China Normal University, No.55, Zhongshan Avenue West, Tianhe District, Guangzhou, 510631, People’s Republic of China

    Hui Yu

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Yu, H. The making of ‘incompetent parents’: intersectional identity, habitus and Chinese rural migrant’s parental educational involvement. Aust. Educ. Res. 47, 555–570 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-019-00361-z

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