How teachers are prepared for rural contexts in China: A case study

This study looks at how teachers are prepared for rural contexts in China with a focus on the representation of the countryside in teacher preparation. Drawing upon the concept of the rural as social representations of space, an ecological approach to learning to teach, and the notion of curriculum as value-laden and political in terms of both product and process, this study considers the roles of various stakeholders in relation to general, academic, and professional education courses to suggest the complexity of representation and enlighten our understandings of teacher education as social (re)production of rural places.;This study concentrates on the 2004 cohort of the Chinese Teacher Preparation Program in the Department of Chinese at East Teachers College, northern Jiangsu, to examine the preparation of future teachers for rural contexts, especially the place of the countryside in teacher education curriculum. Based on the artifact, field observation, and interview data collected in summer 2006 and fall 2007, this study draws upon Fairclough's critical discourse analysis and several other analytical tools to argue that the teacher preparation curriculum tended to position the countryside as "Other" and reinforce the student teachers' disengagement from the countryside, despite the existence of conflicting images and attitudes.;In providing a thick description and analysis of several courses critical to the preparation of Chinese teachers for rural contexts, this study presents a picture of how the Party-State, the textbook writers, the college, the department, the program, the faculty, and the student teachers worked together, consciously or unconsciously, to reproduce place-based inequality. Coupled with the disengagement of teacher preparation from rural contexts was the prevalence of bureaucratic, self-interested, and technocratic discourses. This dissertation concludes with a brief discussion of the ways in which preparing teachers for rural contexts can be considered toward place-based social justice.