The past two decades have seen exponential growth of urbanisation and migration in China. Emerging from this growth is a population of floating and left-behind children which is estimated to be approaching 100 million. Due to their increasing risks of undesirable educational and social, as well as health and psychological, outcomes, there is a great urgency to help floating children and left-behind children beat the odds. This book offers an analysis of how oscillations of government discourse have come to shape central and local educational policies regarding the schooling of these children. It also delves into child and youth resilience in this unique migration context, examining what can be done to build up resilience of floating and left-behind children. In this vein, the book will complement current knowledge and advance context- and culture-specific understandings of child and youth resilience through both school-based and community-based approaches. The book aims to answer a fundamental question: How to help floating children and left-behind children become responsive and resilient to structural deficiencies and dynamics in the migration context of China? This is important reading for scholars, school professionals, community workers, and policy makers to better address the social and educational resilience and wellbeing of floating and left-behind children.

One unintended consequence of the unprecedented rural-to-urban migration in China over the past three decades is the exponentially increased number of "left-behind" children—children whose parents migrated to more developed areas and who live with one parent or other extended family members. The daily lives of these children, including their caretaking arrangements, parent-child bonding and communication, and schooling, are fraught with distractions and uncertainties. Paying special attention to this marginalized group, this book investigates the role of parental migration and the left-behind status in shaping Chinese family dynamics and children’s general wellbeing, including their school performance, delinquency, resilience, feelings of ambiguous loss, and other psychological problems. Blending theory, empirical research, and real-world interviews with left-behind children, China's Left-Behind Children provides a uniquely close look at these children's lives while also providing the larger national context that defines and shapes their everyday lives.

This book uses Bourdieu’s sociological approach for research as a jumping-off point for framing our understandings and analyses of China and Chinese education. Three major themes—inequality, competition, and change—are explored across several theoretical and contextual bases. Bringing together top scholars in the field, the volume examines empirical studies that analyse social (im)mobility through education for students affected by the social divides of class, culture and rural/urban locations; teacher identity and the field of schooling in the current Chinese environment and going forward; and the university as an institution for the production of knowledge about education in the globalising academy. Offering insights into the historical and cultural context for China’s educational landscape, the contributions of this book revisit Bourdieusian concepts from a new empirical vantage point and bring together key studies that illuminate new pathways for the study of Chinese sociology of education.

The book grapples with social inequality, inclusivity, and diversity through the discussions of wellbeing, wellbecoming, and resilience of floating children and left-behind children. It invites families, schools, communities, social organisations, and governments to rethink and recognise the qualities of left-behind children and floating children. The book will be of interest to research students, sociologists of education, educational studies scholars, social workers, school professionals, and policy makers in and beyond China. The past two decades have seen exponential growth of urbanisation and migration in China. Emerging from this growth are a myriad population of floating children and left-behind children and the ever greater social-spatial interpenetration that places these children at risk of undesirable wellbeing. The living and schooling of these children are fraught with potholes and distractions in the context of migration and urbanisation. Extant work often treats floating children and left-behind children as two discrete populations and comes to grips with their wellbeing separately. The deficit model and the ‘do-gooder’ approach have prevailed for a long time, intending to fix the “problems” and correct the “abnormalities” associated with these children. This book differs, however, in its efforts to blur the dichotomy between floating children and left-behind children; in its transformative view and strength-based approach that recast vulnerabilities into opportunities; and in its focus on the nurture of enabling ecologies instead of the nature of individual inferiorities.

Highlighting the changing landscape of Chinese urban state schools under the pressure of recruiting a tremendous number of migrant children, this book examines the quality of state educational provisions from demographic, institutional, familial and cultural angles. Rooted in rich qualitative data from five Chinese metropolitan cities, it identifies the demographic changes in many state schools of becoming ‘migrant majority’ and the institutional reformation of ‘interim quasi-state’ schools under a low cost and inferior schooling approach. This book also digs into the ‘black box’ of cultural reproduction in school and family processes, revealing both a gloomy side of many migrant children’s academic underachievement as a result of troubled home-school relations and a bright side that social inclusion of migrant children in state school promotes their adaptation to urban life. The author concludes that migrant children’s experiences in state (and quasi-state) schools turn them into a generation of ‘new urban working-class’. The monograph will be of interest to scholars, students, practitioners and policymakers who want to better understand educational equality for migrants and other marginalised groups.

Segments of society are drawing upon their faith and spirituality to develop strategies to mend social relationships and fragmented communities. The Contemporary Perspectives on Spirituality in Education book series will feature volumes geared towards understanding and exploring the role of spirituality in addressing challenge, conflict, and marginalization within education in the U.S. and internationally.

In this book, Mu crafts a sociology of resilience through his multi-year research with Australian students. The content is not merely concerned with individual achievements in precarious conditions but also ponders over transformative, reflexive, and power-rejective everyday practices that make social change possible, probable, and even inevitable. Since Emmy Werner and her colleagues discovered the "self-righting" and "invincible" children on the Hawaiian island of Kauai who fared well despite exposure to significant household risks, positive psychology has markedly advanced the knowledge about child and youth resilience to adversities. Yet, many children and adolescents continue to slide through system cracks. This fact does not invalidate psychology of resilience; rather, it urges new frameworks to break the reproductive circle of inequality. Reframing the traditional psychological notion of resilience through recourse to Bourdieu’s relational and reflexive sociology, the book moves beyond individual adaptation to adverse conditions and takes a deep dive into sociological resilience to structural problems. It offers school professionals and educational researchers an epistemological tool to reapproach resilience and reappropriate Bourdieu for social change. Offering scholarship that will interest researchers in the areas of child and youth resilience, sociology of resilience, and sociology of education, the volume is written to engage with the intellectual work of both established scholars and emerging researchers within Australia and beyond. The empirical analyses also provide useful insights for educational professionals in schools and resilience researchers in universities.

By concentrating on the topic of school enrolment policy for rural-to-urban migrant children in China, this book analyses the unequal power relations and structural inequalities that can appear in the context of education. The author complements current knowledge by applying theoretical resources of policy sociology, in particular the thinking of Pierre Bourdieu, into analysis of educational policymaking in the Chinese context. He takes a policy trajectory approach to trace the (unequal) power relations and structural inequalities invested and realised in the school enrolment policy. Rooted in rich qualitative data from five metropolises, he examines both external influences of politics, economy and public policy on educational policy agenda setting and discursive practices within the educational policy cycle, inherent in the post-2013 restrictive school enrolment policy. Structural constraints and agency in the local context are also explored, indicating that the intersectional effects of political, economic, and civic logic can result in differentiated modes of policy enactment. The study will be of interest to scholars, students, policymakers and practitioners in helping address policymaking and social justice in education for migrants and other marginalised groups.

This handbook examines policy and practice from around the world with respect to broadly conceived notions of inclusion and diversity within education. It sets out to provide a critical and comprehensive overview of current thinking and debate around aspects such as inclusive education rights, philosophy, context, policy, systems, and practices for a global audience. This makes it an ideal text for researchers and those involved in policy-making, as well as those teaching in classrooms today. Chapters are separated across three key parts: Part I: Conceptualizations and Possibilities of Inclusion and Diversity in Education Part II: Inclusion and Diversity in Educational Practices, Policies, and Systems Part III: Inclusion and Diversity in Global and Local Educational Contexts