by Garfield Scott
Foreign Tutors’ Transmission of Cultural Capital to Chinese Students:
An Autoethnographic Study
Abstract
Chinese parents understand the importance of educational attainment for their children’s professional success. Admission of their children to higher education in America is a high priority for many Chinese parents. Rural students in China face many cultural and academic challenges to achieve academic aspirations. In response, American tutors have entered the highly competitive and lucrative educational market in China. Using Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory as the frame of inquiry, this project shows how American tutors deliver not just academic knowledge but also cultural capital to Chinese students in their quest to win admission to an American university/college. The project pursues the research questions of how cultural capital factors into rural students’ ability to compete in urban Beijing high schools, how foreign tutors deliver cultural capital, and how cultural capital provides students with a social and an academic advantage. An autoethnographic approach supports the integration of the researcher’s observations from 15 years of studying and teaching in Beijing. This project’s findings can make important theoretical and practical contributions for policy makers, educators, nonprofits, and others interested in helping rural Chinese students achieve academic parity with their urban peers.
CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION
In 2004, I was a student in Beijing taking advantage of everything that the emerging metropolis offered, academically and socially. Although I lived and studied in the northwestern district of Beijing, I spent a lot of my free time in the eastern districts. There was a buzz in this area because of foreign and domestic businesses opening, foreigners moving in to cash in on the latest trends, and others taking advantage of partnerships with Chinese firms. Amongst all the development in the area due to the Beijing’s development plans for the 2008 Summer Olympics, what stuck me most were the long lines of families in front of the United States Embassy. Beijing was still without an inner-city subway system, so bus, taxi or cycling was still the common method of travel. Regardless of the time, anyone passing by the embassy would see the long lines of Chinese outside. Reflecting on the countless conversations with families waiting for student visa requests, I began to understand the journey these families experienced to reach this moment, a journey that was social as much as it was educational. Though I was unfamiliar with the concept at the time, I began to realize how the development of cultural capital facilitated the pursuit of educational and professional opportunities for so many Chinese families. Younger Chinese in particular understood how the reforms were causing a dramatic cultural shift that one must navigate to achieve educational and career goals.
Twenty years later, these cultural conditions in Beijing, and the rest of modern China, have only been reinforced. Chinese parents are desperate to expand educational opportunities for their children.[1] Much of the motivation is to secure admission of their children to higher education in America, the United Kingdom, or colleges and universities in other English-speaking countries.[2] Rural migrants come to the cities not just for work but also to pursue educational opportunities for their children due to the quality gap between urban and rural schools.[3] Competition for access to Beijing’s best high schools situates rural students against their urban peers not just academically but also socially.[4]Rural students in China confront cultural and academic challenges to achieve academic aspirations. American tutors, such as myself, have entered the highly competitive educational market in China to assist both rural and urban students in achieving their parents’ educational and professional aspirations for them, delivering a combination of cultural and academic capital.
Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory is the frame of inquiry for an autoethnographic project that shows how American tutors deliver not just academic knowledge but also cultural capital to Chinese students. Cultural capital theory emphasizes the role of cultural behaviors, knowledge, skills, relationships, and attitudes that predict movement, including downward or upward, in a social setting.[5] Some researchers have applied cultural capital theory to explain student outcomes in China, but this project is unique in utilizing an autoethnographic approach that can provide greater detail about the phenomenon, which operates at a social and psychological level between foreign tutors and their Chinese students.
The project pursues the research questions of how cultural capital factors into rural students’ ability to compete in urban Beijing high schools, how cultural capital provides students with a social and an academic advantage, and how foreign tutors deliver cultural capital. An autoethnographic approach allows the researcher to integrate research findings with observations from 15 years of studying and teaching in Beijing. This project’s findings can make important theoretical and practical contributions for policy makers, educators, nonprofits, and others interested in helping rural Chinese students achieve academic parity with their urban peers.
Biography
My experience in Beijing began upon my acceptance to Peking University to study Mandarin in 2004. My plans were to become a translator-interpreter. As the first African American admitted to Peking University, I experienced my own culturally jarring interactions, ranging from outright racial hostility to well-meaning but still uncomfortable questions about my identity. The majority of my professors and peers at Peking University had never seen an African American except perhaps in media. For the next two years, I spent 14 hours a day studying the language while more importantly immersing myself in Chinese culture, gaining access to my own cultural capital.
In fact, my outsider status in China was not my first experience with this cultural positioning. In middle and high school, I was also the only African American student, a ration of roughly 1:5,000. I quickly realized the importance of developing linguistic-cultural knowledge and skills to excel academically and socially. Most importantly, I transitioned my African American dialect to the mainstream American English dialect spoken by my teachers and fellow students. I understood the relationship between language conformity and cultural assimilation. Linguistic-cultural assimilation was vital to my socio-academic success, and I attribute this assimilation not just to my academic achievement in secondary education but also to the career opportunities it provided, including my acceptance into the naval intelligence program of the U.S. Navy. My cultural capital has allowed me to participate in both professional and social circles that would not normally be open for a black kid from Youngstown, Ohio. My personal experiences with the development of cultural capital informed my observations of the same developmental processes for rural youth in China as I transitioned from student to tutor from 2006 to 2019.
Statement of Research Goals
An autoethnographic research method will include data from my study, life, and work experiences in Beijing from 2004 to 2019. An autoethnographic research design can facilitate the integration of my life experiences with theoretical and research findings about cultural capital and its relevance to educational opportunities in China for rural youth. Autoethnography accepts rather than rejects the value that subjective experience can provide to illuminate research findings. “Autoethnographers recognize and embrace the reality that the person and the personal are always present in social life as well as in the processes of research and representation” (Ellis et al. 2021, 2). In contrast to the strictly ethnographic approach, which delineates between researcher experience and participant experience, the autoethnographic approach rejects the delineation not just as a methodological choice. Rather, this rejection dismisses the notion of an objective perspective. Autoethnography seeks accuracy in observations and interpretations, and accuracy requires accepting the reality that subjective experience influences observations and interpretations.
The autoethnographic method is ideal to pursue Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory since my own experiences involve cultural capital development at two levels. The first level is my own experience developing cultural capital as a foreign student and later worker in China. The second level involves my observations of cultural capital transmission and development in the tutoring/educational culture of China. My experiences with cultural capital, both as a receiver and a distributor, will add significant value to the relevance of the project findings to policy and practices to improve educational outcomes for all Chinese students.
Goal One – Influence the Narrative
The project findings can be part of a broad and perhaps long-term enterprise involving many others in academia, policy, and other cultural stakeholders that shifts the narrative in China about assistance to rural students. Current attitudes are imbued with cultural bias against rural students, which supports Bourdieu’s prediction of socioeconomic elites using cultural capital for stratification. These project findings can help shift the narrative to one that recognizes the value of all students, regardless of cultural background. The narrative must shift from one that supports cultural, academic, and economic stratification to one that supports equity for all, which is the official state policy but falls short in social norms, policy, and educational practices.
Goal Two – Influence on Policy and Practices
The second goal of the research project is to apply the findings of an autoethnographic analysis to influence the narrative about educational policy, reforms, and assistance for students facing cultural barriers to educational achievement. This goal anticipates my findings having a practical impact at several levels. First, tutors and teachers in China can apply my findings to design curricular and pedagogical systems for their students. Second, policymakers can apply my findings at the broader level of program design, including delivery of financial subsidies to facilitate cultural capital transmission for students in need. Third, theorists can use my findings to develop models that facilitate further research into the role of cultural capital in shaping educational outcomes.
Statement of Research Questions
Toward the goal of better understanding the role of cultural capital transmission and development for Chinese students, the following research questions will guide this project. The first research question is:
How does cultural capital impact a rural student’s ability to compete for admission to and success in a Beijing high school?
This question is based on observations and research of the highly competitive marketplace for high school admission in Beijing. High schools are stratified in Beijing based on parental expectations and the promises schools make about educational quality. Elite schools are believed and/or proven to produce students who perform exceptionally well on the national exam and win admission to valued universities, including those in America and abroad. Many rural parents come to Beijing in the hopes of placing their children in such schools, and cultural capital is observed to play a significant role in the probability of both admission and academic success.
The second research question is:
How does cultural capital contribute to upward mobility for rural students?
This question addresses the problem of cultural capital being isolated as an abstract concept rather than something that manifests in lived experience. The answer will provide specific examples from observations to illustrate how cultural capital contributes to social and academic outcomes for rural students, which combined can be referred to as upward mobility. This question is also necessary to show how academic and social success is an indicator of professional/career outcomes.
The third research question is:
How do foreign educators transmit cultural capital to students?
This question originates in my personal and professional experience as a student and an educator in China. Foreign educators engage in formal and informal practices, both inside and outside the educational setting, to transmit cultural capital. They use a combination of interpersonal, communicational, and pedagogical practices to transmit cultural capital. Cultural capital is transmitted in many ways, both intentionally and unintentionally, from educators to students and their parents, in the variety of settings and interactions that exist in cultures, subcultures, and relationships.
Significance of Study
The study can provide unique understanding due to the autoethnographic approach of the crucial social and educational issues associated with the transmission and development of cultural capital. The literature lacks autoethnographic research conducted by American educators in China exploring the issue of cultural capital. This study can fill the research gap in the literature. A self-narrative can provide the perspective of an American educator in China that adds value to other research findings that use other types of design. An insider perspective is essential to understand the subtle and often undetectable ways that cultural capital is transmitted and developed in the educational setting. Likewise, an insider perspective is valuable to understand how cultural capital can be denied to students by elite groups maintaining socio-academic stratification.
Indeed, early research on educational policies in post-reform China documented the origins of socio-academic stratification. In Chinese Education: Problems, Policies, and Prospects, first published in 1991, Irving Epstein documented an elitist educational system in China that supported party elites and the early economic elites that were taking advantage of the post-Mao reforms.[6] Indeed, contrary to official state socialist philosophy, the Chinese educational system as early as the 1990s began to splinter between a public and private school system, resulting in the predictable differences in status and quality.[7] In the past 30 years, socioeconomic stratification has strengthened even as hundreds of millions of Chinese have entered the middle and upper classes.[8]
This combination of economic growth and stratification is the paradox of the Chinese socioeconomic miracle. Certainly, economic reforms, made possible through providing a quality public education, have facilitated industrial development, job growth, income growth, and a higher quality of living for most Chinese compared to the pre-reform era. Yet stratification continues and even worsens as socioeconomic inequality grows between the affluent and the marginalized. This socioeconomic divide is most evident in urban versus rural economies, educational systems, cultural production, and cultural access.[9]
The significance of this study is to expand upon what previous research has found in a broad and impersonal view of the subject of urban-rural inequalities in education in China. An autoethnographic approach can enrich the body of literature by providing a distinctly personal perspective, not just the perspective of the researcher but the perspectives of students and their families. Cultural capital is an abstract concept that the research and theoretical literature reinforces by depersonalizing human experience into conceptual language. This study can play a significant role in personalizing the impact of cultural capital, whether denied or transmitted, in socio-academic outcomes for rural Chinese students by using this researcher’s experience, observations, and interpretations.
The autoethnographic approach can also contribute to the scarce literature on cultural capital and outcomes for rural students in China as participants in the tutoring system. Most of the research of private education in China takes a broad look at policies, systems, and institutional practices. In their 2024 study of the so-called shadow admissions practices in Chinese high schools, Jun Li et al. gathered data from private tutoring businesses to reveal the nature of their social ties to the schools, their customers.[10] While the study findings provide into how cultural capital can influence educational outcomes, the methodology lacked insight about the impacts of cultural capital on students and their families.
Similarly, most studies of rural-urban divides in education adopt methodologies that collect and analyze quantitative data, such as examination scores, teacher credentials, and enrollment in elite schools. In their study of reforms to China’s university entrance examination system to make it less biased toward rural students, researchers failed to provide any qualitative data from students and their families.[11] In a study of efforts to close the funding gap in public education between urban and public schools, the researcher limited analysis to budget differentials among provinces and districts.[12] In a study of efforts to improve early childhood education for rural children, the researcher examined student performance outcomes and conducted an analysis of existing and proposed policies.[13] All of these studies make important contributions, but they are limited by an emphasis on impersonal research design.
This study can contribute to the literature by personalizing the nature and impact of cultural capital transmission and development. Personalization will occur as the researcher’s own experience captures the dynamics of transmission and development between tutor, student, and parents. The autoethnographic approach of this study makes it stand alone in a body of literature that is broad, depersonalized, and conceptual.
Even as it humanizes the nature and impact of cultural capital in the educational setting in Beijing for rural students, this study can also contribute to the theoretical literature. The autoethnographic approach can personalize Bourdieu and later theorists’ concepts and theories about cultural capital. The highly philosophical nature of Bourdieu’s theory can be applied to actual people, relationships, and human outcomes. This application can both illuminate existing theoretical assumptions and perhaps develop new ones.
Overview of the Research
Chapter 2 elaborates in greater detail on the literature findings. The first section of the literature review examines the research on educational disparities in China. These studies document inequality and stratification, particularly between urban students and rural students. The literature documents the emergence of the foreign tutor marketplace in which I participated. The literature documents how a stratified system includes exchanges among different stakeholders, including parents, tutors, educational brokers, school officials, and policymakers. The literature on contemporary educational practices in China reveals a biased narrative against rural student aspirations that at the same time is being recognized as an impediment to China’s egalitarian goals and social stability.
Chapter 3 provides a theoretical overview of cultural capital theory. Special attention is paid to how cultural capital predicts variation in equality and stratification in societies, how cultural capital predicts inequality in education, and how cultural capital predicts inequality in other social and economic outcomes due to educational inequality. The theory’s application to conditions of stratification in what is officially touted as a socialist egalitarian society will be examined, including in educational and geographical outcomes, notably the rural-urban divide in social, academic, and professional representation in China. The institutionalization of cultural capital in systems and processes is examined, including the use of educational credentials to gain upward generational mobility. Bourdieu’s concept of limiting cultural capital to maintain stratification is examined, as well as the counter-efforts to expand cultural capital to achieve egalitarian outcomes.
Chapter 3 also introduces principles and methods of autoethnographic research. The relationship between subjective experience and social reality is explored and applied to this research project. For example, my cultural experiences were part of a broader social reality where cultural capital was transmitted to my students and their parents. Autoethnography allows me to understand how my personal experiences were part of a larger social system. This social system illustrates many of the challenges and opportunities for cultural capital to improve academic outcomes for rural students. The unique way in which autoethnography combines subjective, scientific, and systematic methods to collect and analyze data is presented to justify the approach.
Chapter 4 begins the autoethnographic method of presenting the results of data analysis of personal experiences. Social, cultural and political experiences of my living situation will be examined from my entry to China in 2004. This begins with my experience as a student, including learning how to be a guest in mainland China during a time of tremendous social change in the reform era. These experiences included being a foreign exchange student, indeed the first African American student, to Peking University, navigating local politics in the bureaucracy for international students, and forming relationships. Second, my autoethnography includes observations of social realities, including the economic development, emergence of the private education industry, and the various socioeconomic phenomena that were revolutionizing China in the first two decades of the 21st Century. Finally, I present my observations of what upward mobility looks like for non-elite families with limited resources for obtaining cultural capital.
Chapter 5 delves further into my professional experience as a foreign tutor in Beijing. I present my students and academic programs as a case study, writing about the family experiences and social traditions, business practices, educational beliefs and norms, and my encounters with both rural and urban students. These results are generated from copious written and spoken notes collected and analyzed for the past two decades. These experiences reveal the emergence of British and American cultural capital in the educational system and the orientation of cultural capital toward college admissions, particularly for study abroad opportunities, considered the greatest academic status symbol of all. These personal experiences reveal a highly complex private educational system, with mom-and-pop English schools competing for migrants students, tutoring programs operating within schools, and individual tutoring offering services outside of a formal school setting. These personal experiences also reveal the disparities in cultural capital delivered to rural students by many private operators in the educational marketplace.
Chapter 6 presents the results of my observations of the experiences of middle, high school, and graduate students from Beijing schools. I explore and compare the experiences between rural and urban (Beijing) students. Based on my notes and recollections, I conduct individual case studies that illustrate key aspects of contemporary experiences and their relationship to cultural capital theory. I show how the combination of individual experiences and institutional practices produce outcomes for students. I provide real-life examples of my own interactions with students to demonstrate ways that cultural capital is transmitted, developed, and sometimes impeded by factors outside of the tutor-student relationship. I show how multiple social settings coexist, present different opportunities and challenges, and deliver outcomes for students.
Chapter 7 focuses on my experiences with students seeking admission into Chinese and American colleges and universities. These experiences show how successful transmission and development of cultural capital can help students achieve academic aspirations. These experiences also reveal how disparities continue to exist as cultural capital is embedded into the gaokao (the national examination for university), which means that students without access to cultural capital will suffer competitive disadvantage to those students who have the relevant cultural capital. I also show how preparation for the national entrance examination is predicted by cultural capital theory, including the stressors imposed on students and families with cultural deficits. Through personal testimonies, letters with students and parents, and a series of vignettes, I narrate my role in becoming a gatekeeper for parents and students seeking access to cultural capital to gain access to higher education. These experiences sometimes succeeded but often failed for many rural students. Indeed, these experiences show the correlation between urban residential status, access to cultural capital, and access to higher education in China, though certainly some rural students do realize their aspirations and the aspirations of their parents. My experiences also reveal the institutional disparities in access to higher education as cultural capital resources distributed unevenly between Beijing and those students who remain in rural areas.
Chapter 8 discusses the previous findings and then applies them in greater detail to cultural capital theory. I show how the research questions were answered by the integration of secondary research, autoethnography, and ethnographic methods. I show convergence among cultural capital theory, my personal experiences, and the research on disparities for rural students in China. I suggest limitations of my research, including the potential for researcher bias and the efforts made to minimize it.
The report concludes with policy and research implications. Policy implications include the need to integrate cultural capital delivery as part of an egalitarian system of education in China. The current system supports disparities based on residential status. This presents a social, political, and economic hazard for China from socioeconomic inequality. An underground educational system reinforces inequalities through inequitable transmission of cultural capital based on family residential status. I suggest areas for future research, calling especially for other foreign educators in China to contribute to the body of literature with their own autoethnographic studies. Such studies can illuminate and personalize the research findings on cultural capital, educational disparities, and educational outcomes in China. Foreign participants in China’s educational system have vital insights that the autoethnographic approach can access and share to humanize the research literature.
Bibliography
Ellis, Carolyn, Holman, Stacy, & Adams, Tony E. 2021. Handbook of Autoethnography. Taylor
& Francis.
Epstein, Irving. 1991. Chinese Education: Problems, Policies, and Prospects. Routledge.
Gao, Lan. 2011. Impacts of Cultural Capital on Student College Choice Processes in China.
Lexington Books.
Jones, Geoffrey, & Yuhai Wu. 2021. “The Business of K-12 Education in China.” Harvard
Business School 22-022: 1-50.
Li, Jian, & Eryong Xue. 2020. Shaping Education Reform in China: Overviews, Policies, and
Implications. Springer.
Li, Jun, Kobakhidze, Magda Nutsa, & Hanyu Qin. 2024. “Unveiling Shadow Admissions To
Lower Secondary Schools: Brokerage Practices Amid Mainland China’s Strong Regulations on Private Tutoring.” International Journal of Educational Development 104: 1-8.
Lin, Jing. 1999. Social Transformation and Private Education in China. Praeger.
Medvetz, Thomas, and Jeffrey Sallaz. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu. Oxford University Press.
Ruan, Ji. 2017. Guanxi, Social Capital and School Choice in China: The Rise of Social Capital.
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[1] Edward Vickers and Zeng Xiaodong, 2017, Education and Society in Post-Mao China, Routledge.
[2] Jian Li and Eryong Xue, 2020, Shaping Education Reform in China: Overview, Policies, and Implications, Springer.
[3] Geoffrey Jones and Yuhai Wu, 2021, “The Business of K-12 Education in China,” Harvard Business School 22-022: 1-50.
[4] Lan Gao, 2011, Impacts of Cultural Capital on Student College Choice Processes in China, Lexington Books.
[5] Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey Sallaz, 2018, The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu, Oxford University Press.
[6] Irving Epstein, 1991, Chinese Education: Problems, Policies, and Prospects, Routledge.
[7] Jing Lin, 1999, Social Transformation and Private Education in China, Praeger.
[8] Janette Ryan, 2019, Education in China: Philosophy, Politics, and Culture, Polity Press.
[9] Ji Ruan, 2017, Guanxi, Social Capital and School Choice in China: The Rise of Social Capital
[10] Jun Li, Magda Nutsa Kobakhidze, and Hanyu Qin, 2024, “Unveiling Shadow Admissions To
Lower Secondary Schools: Brokerage Practices Amid Mainland China’s Strong Regulations On Private Tutoring,” International Journal of Educational Development 104: 1-8.
[11] Wang Xiong and Zhu Zhengbiao, 2009, “The Reform of China’s University Entrance Examination System,” in The China Educational Development Yearbook, Volume 1, edited by Yang Dongping, Brill.
[12] Weichen, Fan. 2009. “Seeking Balanced Development of Urban and Rural Compulsory Education.” In The China Educational Development Yearbook, Volume 1, edited by Yang Dongping, Brill.
[13] Chu Zhaohui, 2009, “Early Childhood Education in China: Problems and Solutions,” In The China Educational Development Yearbook, Volume 1, edited by Yang Dongping, Brill.
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