Alternative education spaces and pathways: Insights from an international Christian school in China

Abstract

The nascent scholarship on geographies of alternative education focuses on alternative education spaces, mostly located in the UK, that resist and/or negotiate neoliberal restructuring of education, some of which cater to socially marginalised groups. In contrast, through an ethnographic focus on an underground Christian international school in China, we examine an alternative education space that responds to parents' aspirations for their children to be inculcated with global cultural capital, Chinese values, and Christian beliefs. These aspirations are not fulfilled in mainstream state schools or international schools in China, but are demanded by parents looking for a “superior” set of skills for their children to navigate the increasingly neoliberal, and global, higher education and employment landscapes. The discussion reveals the incongruities in the school's claim to simultaneously instil global, local, and spiritual forms of cultural capital, which leads to two visions of the pathway to higher education. The paper expands the geographies of alternative education in three ways. First, it shows how international and faith‐based schools can provide alternative schooling. Second, it shows how the departure of alternative education spaces from their mainstream counterparts can reveal the inadequacies of the latter. Third, it draws attention to how the cultural capital inculcated through alternative education can lead to alternative international higher education pathways within and beyond China.

Nationalising the international in China: A phenomenological study on the purpose of international schooling in an era of regulation

“…However, de Silva et al. (2020) have underscored the agency of schools and teachers in subverting regulatory constraints, and thus forging a middle path that straddles the national and the global, forming new hybrid spaces of resistance. With this in mind, the rhetoric of regulation may indeed be very strong, but it does not necessarily follow that actors will embrace regulation in the same uniform manner.…”

“…As de Silva et al. (2020) point out, it is important to consider the agency of schools and teachers in subverting regulatory constraints, and thus forging a middle path that straddles the national, the global and a hybrid condition, which has been understood as a form of ‘cosmopolitan nationalism’ (Maxwell et al., 2020; Wright, Ma, & Auld, 2022; Yemini et al., 2023a, 2023b). The global form of schooling serves as a template on which the local shapes and ‘dresses up an emerging form of local international schooling on matters related to curriculum, activities, and school administration’ (Wu & Koh, 2023, 164).…”

Alternative(s): Better or just different?

“…More recent papers on alternative education take it for granted or simply ignore the obscure criteria of alternative education. They give an account of alternative schooling practices, for example, in international Christian schools in China (De Silva et al., 2020), the education of girls from marginalised groups (Fute & Wan, 2021) or try to map the shift from cognitive learning styles to subject‐oriented learning (Sliwka & Yee, 2015) just to mention a few from around the world. All those papers have one thing in common: they present approaches to schooling labelled ‘ alternative ’ that are in some way or other distinguished from a type of schooling that is labelled ‘ mainstream ’ without going into empirical and highly context‐specific detail.…”

The (de)territorialised appeal of international schools in China: Forging brands, boundaries and inter-belonging in segregated urban space

“…These distinctions (and others) mark the school as different, thus generating competitive advantage and appeal. Indeed, the effects of such distinctions go beyond what can be seen, and include the mental and emotional forms of separation that are reproduced through the worldviews embedded within these schools' curriculums and pedagogy (De Silva et al, 2020;Woods and Kong, 2020). Thus, whilst international schools provide a physical and symbolic indication of the ways in which international education marketplaces are (de)territorialised, their influence on the urban structure is also played out in more subtle ways through the everyday attitudes and behaviours of their students and staff.…”