Baiwen Peng

China

Baiwen Peng is a PhD student in Comparative and International Development Education, OLPD. Originally from mainland China, he studied in Beijing and Hong Kong and was a social science researcher in Hong Kong's universities before joining the program. The projects he worked on covered a diverse range of topics, including private tutoring and its regulation, aspirations and ethnicity, special education, education technology, and digitalization. His current research focuses on alternative education, bottom-up education initiatives, structure/agency, and the concept of minjian (民间，meaning "among the people" or "grassroots"). In 2023, he won the TOEFL Hong Kong Scholarship and was a TOEFL ambassador. 

2024 Presenter, Colloquium on the World's Education System Series 

(He/him/his)

PhD Student 

Comparative and International Development Education

Department of Organizational Leadership and Policy Development 

In search of new possibilities: Alternative education in China

April 6th, 2024 @2:00PM

The literature on education in China has focused on education in its mainstream form - public and private schooling as well higher education - that is shaped by the government in its agenda for national development. However, little is known about education that deviates from the official discourse. It is initiated through grassroots movements that imagine different possibilities for education that demonstrate a “refusal” (Grande, 2004) to mainstream education fraught with entrenched problems (Xu & Spruyt, 2023). The nature of such education is scantly understood, and the forms it takes, and the reason why it exists are largely unknown (Xu & Spruyt, 2022).


The presentation is based on an on-going literature review and will provide an overview of such “alternative education” in China, with focus on its nature, forms, scale, and relationship to mainstream education. By doing so, it will make a significant contribution to understanding a largely overlooked education terrain in China, and to discussions on new education possibilities in a global context.


References: 

Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Xu, W., & Spruyt, B. (2022). ‘The road less travelled’: Towards a typology of alternative education in China. Comparative Education, 58(4), 434–450. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2022.2108615

Xu, W., & Spruyt, B. (2023). Negotiating for distance: The Chinese middle-class seeking alternative education in the idyll. Educational Review, 1–19.