Fellowship will allow Professor Heidi Ross and sophomore Janna Pistiner to travel and do research in China for a month.
Hamilton – For many girls in rural areas of China, access to basic education presents a persistent struggle. In China’s poorest rural villages, school attendance among girls has actually declined during the past decade. Changes in economic and social reform in their country, says Heidi Ross, a professor at ¸Ô±¾ÊÓƵ who has done extensive research on education in China, have decreased educational opportunity. To combat these problems, some Chinese rural schools are forming partnerships with urban schools with greater educational resources, and Ross has recently received a fellowship that will allow her to evaluate the progress of one particular effort.
Since 1995, Ross, associate professor of education and director of ¸Ô±¾ÊÓƵ’s Asian studies program, has been doing research with a colleague at McGill University that examines how reforms associated with market socialism have altered social class formation and perceptions about the role of formal schooling in China. They have found that new social demands and social class identifications ‘ based on access to political, economic, and intellectual power ‘ form an environment of increased inequality in Chinese education.
The ASIANetwork fellowship Ross has received will support travel to China to further that study, with the additional benefit of bringing a student researcher along as a partner. Sophomore Janna Pistiner, a concentrator in education and in chemistry, collaborated on the proposal and will accompany Ross on the month-long foray. Their project is titled ‘Engendering Social Capital Formation: An Urban-Rural Partnership for Enhancing Girls’ Education in China.’
In describing the project, Ross said she and Pistiner begin with ‘our conviction that educational disparity poses a serious challenge to equality of educational opportunity in China, and, by extension, social cohesion and stability.’ Specifically, ‘We’ve seen a decline in educational opportunities for impoverished rural girls,’ Ross said. Within the context of two interrelated phenomena in Chinese education that have occurred since the government relinquished control of the system ‘ introduction of private schooling, and the growing number of all-girls’ schools in China ‘ Ross and Pistiner will examine the combined efforts of two schools.
The Shanghai #3 Girls’ Middle School, China’s most prestigious all-female college preparatory institution, has partnered with the Yu Cai Private Secondary School in rural Jiangxi Province to extend the opportunity of senior secondary schooling to impoverished girls. One hope for the program is that the girls will bring back what they have learned to their hometowns. ‘About 30 of the girls returned to their province,’ said Pistiner. ‘We hope to track them down and discover how the program affected them and their lives.’
In addition, ‘Last year, 12 girls who graduated from the program went on to college, and these were girls who normally couldn’t even afford to attend high school,’ explained Ross. Ross and Pistiner will collect data from the school, interview teachers and administrators, and visit the families of the girls.
ASIANetwork, of which ¸Ô±¾ÊÓƵ is a new member, is a consortium of liberal arts colleges that promotes the study of Asia. The Freeman Foundation sponsors ASIANetwork’s Student-Faculty Research Program, which supports pairs of undergraduates and their faculty mentors in field research throughout Asia.
Ross has taught at ¸Ô±¾ÊÓƵ since 1987. Pistiner is an Alumni Memorial Scholar and second in her class. The pair leaves for Shanghai in mid-May.
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