Global Learning from the Periphery: An Ethnographic Study of a Chinese Urban Migrant School
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Sustainability 2020, 12(1), 381; https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010381
Received: 25 August 2019 / Revised: 10 December 2019 / Accepted: 11 December 2019 / Published: 3 January 2020
(This article belongs to the Special Issue South/North Perspectives on Global Learning for Sustainable Development)
This paper presents an ethnographic study on the global learning practice of teachers and students in a Chinese internal migrant school. Rural children have relocated to urban centers with their parents on a massive scale over the past decades, as China undergoes rapid economic changes. Many migrant children have to attend privately run migrant schools which often function within limited budgets. Drawing on various types of data, this study investigates informal learning in a global context. In particular, the research focuses on a Scout program that is modeled on world Scouting movements and that is tailored for the migrant pupils’ educational demands. The data collection tools include participant observation, in-depth interview and document collection. The research finds that, with limited educational resources, the informants learn globally to improve the sustainable development of the migrant pupils, to fight against educational inequality, and to facilitate mutual understanding between the migrant and the urban communities. This paper concludes that global learning plays an important role in the informants’ ‘’up-scaling” progress facilitated by their linguistic capacity, computer literacy, and social network.
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Keywords:
global learning; informal learning; sustainability; internal migration; urban village; WeChat
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited
MDPI and ACS Style
Dong, J. Global Learning from the Periphery: An Ethnographic Study of a Chinese Urban Migrant School. Sustainability 2020, 12, 381.
AMA Style
Dong J. Global Learning from the Periphery: An Ethnographic Study of a Chinese Urban Migrant School. Sustainability. 2020; 12(1):381.
Chicago/Turabian StyleDong, Jie. 2020. "Global Learning from the Periphery: An Ethnographic Study of a Chinese Urban Migrant School" Sustainability 12, no. 1: 381.
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