Disciplining the online class: Control and resistance of rural students in China during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

In early 2020, the spread of COVID-19 resulted in the wide use of online classes in China. Drawing on Foucault’s disciplinary power and De Certeau’s strategy-tactic dialectic, this paper explores the online learning practice of students in a rural junior middle school at Yu Town in Central China during the pandemic, through interviewing the students, teachers, and parents. The findings show that the teachers and the students engaged in a power game in online education and employed a series of strategies and tactics to realize the control and resistance through the creative use of media technologies. The study reveals the paradox that the rural students’ agency and resistance, enabled by the media technologies, may result in negative consequences for their learning and further broaden the gap between rural and urban students, thus reproducing the system that they are dissatisfied with.

Introduction

In January 2020, the COVID-19 broke out in Wuhan, China, and spread rapidly across the country with the large-scale migration during the Chinese Spring Festival. Because the students were not allowed to return to school at that time, the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) required all the schools throughout the country to provide online classes, which was the first time that real-time online education was applied to the compulsory education nationwide. The teaching was switched from offline classrooms to online spaces, and students used mobile phones, iPads, and computers to connect with their teachers.

Rural students in China, especially those with a low-income family background, are disadvantaged in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Before the pandemic, the use of computers and the Internet in their study and daily life was sporadic, and they only used mobile phones for connections and entertainment. The China Development Research Foundation (2020) found that the proportion of rural students who could take online classes on time (54.1%) was far lower than that of county-level cities (80.1%) and towns (70.3%). Since the access rate to broadband is only 58% in rural areas (Wang, 2022), 32% of junior middle school students residing in these areas could not participate in online learning during the pandemic, severely limiting the implementation of online education in underdeveloped rural areas.

Silverstone (1994) argues that mediated communication has changed how people communicate and interact. With mobile phones and computers as the carrier, online education has become a new type of mediated communication between teachers and students. Young students may have a higher level of digital literacy in mobile phone use than the teachers and parents (Liu et al., 2021), which may empower them in the process of mediated communication. Much of the literature on online education has taken a technical or managerial approach, focusing on the issue of the implementation of ICTs in schools (Peach & Bieber, 2015). However, this approach may overlook the potential impact of such technologies on the interactions between the teachers and the students. Furthermore, very few communication research studies have examined online education from critical approaches. Based on Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power, we posit that discipline and resistance are prevalent phenomena in online education. Thus, we wish to explore what strategies the teachers and students employed to achieve discipline and resistance in online learning, through studying a rural junior middle school in Central China during the pandemic.

Literature review

Critical studies of online education

Recently some scholars began to take a critical approach to online education, examining how it influences established academic norms and power relations in schools and universities (Lee, 2020). Despite the assertion that network technology makes open education possible and enables people to be liberated from the oppression and constraints of hierarchy (Gourlay, 2015), new technologies may also be oppressive because those with power can extend their gaze and secure greater control over others more easily (Conole & Dyke, 2004). Newer digital techniques of dataveillance (e.g., the behavior-monitoring app “ClassDojo”) are beginning to proliferate through schools, marking a shift from the “surveillance school” to “dataveillance schools” that involve the routine collection and analysis of children’s data (Lupton & Williamson, 2017).

There is an increasing concern about potential infringements of technological applications on individuals. Land and Bayne (2004), for example, have critiqued the default inclusion of monitoring tools in online learning technologies (e.g., Blackboard, a learning management system used for course delivery and management for institutions and teachers) that make it easy for teachers to monitor student activities more closely than ever before. Lupton and Williamson (2017) argued that educational applications such as “ClassDojo” translate children’s classroom behaviors into visualized behavioral profiles and timelines that can be transmitted to parents for inspection in the home, which may override the rights of children. Based on Foucault’s conception of power, Peach and Bieber (2015) find that online education has led the members of traditional universities to use new strategies and techniques for control. For example, several faculty members in their study report that the course evaluation instrument that students complete for online courses differs from the instrument students complete in face-to-face courses and includes questions that are not on the traditional instrument. Ovetz (2017) reveals that the new disciplinary power of online education has produced self-regulated online learners and teachers whose actions and behaviors are efficiently governed by the surveillance features embedded in online learning management systems.

Despite the prevalence of disciplinary power in online education, individuals involved in power relations also developed means for circumventing or resisting surveillance and discipline. As Foucault et al. (1990) argued, “Where there is power, there is resistance” (p. 95). It is necessary to understand if and how individuals who are “dominated” resist. According to Ashforth and Mael (1998), resistance is the “intentional acts of commission or omission that defy the wishes of others” (p. 90). Liu et al. (2021), in examining how disciplinary power was exercised and resisted in a Chinese setting of online classes, find that not just the “guard” role of teachers but also the whole power system of school became dysfunctional. They argued that with the decline of teachers’ disciplinary power, students gained more freedom and autonomy for resistance or rebellion. Peach and Bieber (2015) revealed how faculty members used online education as resistance strategies to cope with the pressure of traditional techniques of control (e.g., course scheduling, office hours, and summer courses) and to publicize their work and gain recognition in their specialization.

Foucault’s disciplinary power and De Certeau’s strategy-tactic dialectic

Foucault (1995) believes that power is omnipresent. Power sustains social relations and ensures the operation of social mechanisms through the techniques of discipline. Foucault’s conception of discipline focuses on the micro-techniques of power that rationalize and normalize collective rules. Foucault (1995) argued that the operation of disciplinary power is mainly based on three techniques: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. Hierarchical observation is a kind of “surveillance,” which contains overt and covert forms of monitoring. Normalizing judgment is “a complementary disciplinary technique that does not simply seek to repress, but operates interdependently with hierarchical observation to normalize the collective” (Kitto, 2003, p. 4). Examination is a highly ritualized discipline and also exists in the above two forms. In summary, power operates by subjecting individuals to normative regulation through mass surveillance, social categorization, and corrective treatment. Disciplinary power produces normalized individuals and consent (Deetz, 1998, 2003).

Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of power, De Certeau (2002) proposed the power theory of daily life practice. However, he seems to suggest that Foucault overestimates the effectiveness of structural control and ignores the resistance in micro-practices of individuals. De Certeau posits that everyday life is a space where continuous domination and anti-domination, oppression, and resistance coexist. He used the conceptual tools of “strategy” and “tactic” to elaborate the power relationship between dominant and disadvantaged groups. Strategy is the established structure and rules established by the dominant groups, which require appropriate and standardized behavior of people on specific occasions. Tactic is the intentional behavior and various means of guerrilla resistance of the disadvantaged groups. The basic feature of tactics is not to have face-to-face struggle with dominant groups but to circumvent the rules at the individual or small group level, that is, evade discipline without leaving their sphere of influence (Ward, 2000). Everyday practice uses ideas and materials provided by the dominant socio-economic order in alternative ways, thus allowing for the exercise of agency and the possibility of resistance. Due to De Certeau’s emphasis on “the power of the weak,” or the art of resistance and subversion, he has been viewed as a “theorist of subversion,” whereas Foucault a “theorist of domination” (Karner, 2004). Scott (1985) held similar views and used the concept of “weapons of the weak” to elaborate the non-public, informal, and non-violent everyday resistance. The daily struggles can be regarded as a “hidden transcript” or hidden text that contradicts or fights against the “public transcript” (Murphy, 1998). The existence of a “hidden transcript” shows that subordinate groups may create and maintain an independent space for action behind the stage and form their cultural cognition through unique practices.

Foucault’s disciplinary power is one of the most cited theories in the fields of education, communication, and management (Lee, 2020; Deetz, 1998, 2003; Mumby, 2005). For example, Ball (2019) argued that a Foucauldian education is a form of education that places critique at its center and rests on the contingency of power, truth, and subjectivity. Clark and Markula (2017) employed Foucault’s theory of power to study how the organization of time and space is used to train ballet bodies and how dancers participate in power relations, for example, the floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the studio work as surveillance tools that allowed dancers to continuously monitor their own and others’ movements, and enabled the teacher to observe the dancers’ bodies from all angles. Liu et al. (2021) investigated the practice of online education in a middle school in Xi’an, China, and found that Foucault’s three forms of disciplinary power are prevalent. Management scholars found that identity regulation through members’ internalization of norms has been a major means of organizational control, which aims to produce the appropriate employees (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002; Manleya et al., 2016). Gabriel (2008) used the metaphor of a glass cage to examine today’s organizations and revealed three forms of resistance: keeping distance (neither conformity nor rebellion), whistle-blowing, and exit.

Disciplinary power has been present in schools from their outset. In traditional forms of education, teachers are the spokespersons of official authority, who own the disciplinary power and the pedagogical knowledge (Rovea, 2021). However, in online education, new media technologies may empower students and help them challenge the traditional power relationship between teachers and students. The online class practice in China’s rural areas is not only about the interaction between ICTs and people but also the ways in which these media technologies are embedded in online teaching and learning under the macrostructure of Chinese society. It brings the teachers, students, and parents together as subjects in the power field and constructs the meaning of technology, learning, and education.

Very few communication research studies have made use of the perspectives of Foucault and De Certeau to analyze online classes, a new form of mediated communication. Barker and Cheney (1994) held that discipline is inherently a communication construct in that the disciplinary elements of modern society frame and stand for relations between persons. According to Mumby (2005), a dialectical approach is needed to study discipline because research that focuses predominantly on either control or resistance runs the risk of reifying one or the other. Drawing on Foucault’s disciplinary power and De Certeau’s strategy-tactic dialectic, this study aims to explore how new media technologies become incorporated in online education and contribute to the dynamics of the power relationship between teachers and students, more specifically, how the teachers and students employ new media technologies for their purposes of control and resistance in online classes.

Method

Yu Town was selected for the fieldwork of this study. It is a small town in the western part of Hubei Province (whose capital is Wuhan, the center of COVID-19 in early 2020), composed of 16 villages. Most middle-aged people work in cities far from their homes, leaving the elderly and children in their hometown. According to the local government’s statistics, there are about 34,000 registered residents, and 15,000 of them work away from the town, which accounts for 40 percent of the population. Yu Middle School is the only junior middle school in the town, with 562 students and 59 teachers.

There are two reasons for choosing Yu Town as the case study: firstly, it is a typical mountainous town in Central China. Its economy is underdeveloped, representing many such small towns and rural areas. Many parents in the 16 villages of the town have left their homes to work in big cities, resulting in the issue of left-behind children. Secondly, Yu Town is the hometown of one of the authors. “Fieldwork at home” is a traditional practice for anthropologists and sociologists to do fieldwork due to the convenience of securing reliable support (Guan et al., 2020). At the same time, the other coauthor has a sense of strangeness to the town’ s situation. Therefore, the authors can also conduct the research as “outsiders.”

The interviews were conducted at the end of 2020 for one month. A total of 14 junior middle school students, four in grade nine, five in grade eight, and five in grade seven, were interviewed. We also interviewed 10 junior middle school teachers from various subjects and different ages. Eight parents were interviewed, who were the fathers and mothers of the students in the middle school, and some were obtained by snowball sampling. Students’ interviews were conducted face-to-face. Some parents and teachers were interviewed online by phone or WeChat voice. The average time of each interview was about 40–45 minutes, and after obtaining the interviewees’ consent, the authors used the mobile phone recording function to record the interview and transcribed the interview soon after each interview was completed. For the ethical requirements of academic research, all the interviewees involved in this study were treated anonymously in the article.

The interview covered three parts. The first part asked about the basic daily routines of online class. The second part focused on the communication behavior of the respondents in the process of the online class, and the key questions include the following: How to communicate with students/parents/teachers during the period of online education? For teachers, how to manage students; and for students, how to deal with the management of teachers? Finally, the interview question is about the respondents’ views of online classes, including the differences between online education and traditional offline class.

A thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. It focused on the respondents’ specific actions and meanings with regard to control and resistance in their online teaching and learning experiences (Riessman, 2008). The analysis focused on identifying the themes in the interview data, especially the ways that the respondents interpret their control or resistance actions. We mainly used the constant comparative method to conduct the thematic analysis, which shares some features with grounded theory. The authors carefully read the full texts of the data several times, paying special attention to the statements that entail their control or resistance actions. We compared data from the same interviewee, data from different interviewees, and compared control and resistance tactics against other control and resistance tactics for similarities and differences. This method helped to ensure credibility of the analysis.

Our initial coding, focusing on the control and/or resistance tactics and their contexts, stayed close to the data and remained open to all possible directions. Then we compared these codes based on their similarities and differences and sorted out frequently appeared codes to form sub-themes, for example, the space discipline, time discipline, ritual discipline, and parents-involving discipline. Finally, we came up with the major themes and their dimensions, for example, the teachers’ control strategies include the above four disciplines; the students’ resistance tactics include “exiting the virtual classroom,” “editing the photos” and “stealing the photos,” “pretend to be flustered,” and making fun of the teacher and deconstruct the serious atmosphere of the classroom. The two authors coded half of the interviews and achieved consistency after discussion. Then one of the authors coded the remaining data, and the results were reviewed and refined by the two authors together.

Findings: Control and resistance in online classes

Both the teachers and students in the school encountered technical obstacles in the process because of their disadvantaged social economic status compared with their urban peers. Having a mobile device is the prerequisite for online classes, but some of the students did not have one when they were told to take online classes. Most students who are interviewed have suffered from online access problems, such as no broadband, poor network signal, and power failure at home. These factors led to the dilemma that the online class could not be accessible to all students, and the teachers had to take a series of measures to solve the problems. For example, the teachers used the basic live broadcasting function instead of the meeting model, consuming less of the students’ mobile data traffic. They also had to allow students who did not have a mobile device to be temporarily absent from the class, which limited the students’ ability to participate. Later, the school helped these students to get mobile devices through seeking financial support from the government.

In implementing online classes, the school required the DingTalk (a multi-terminal application for communication and cooperation created for Chinese enterprises by the Alibaba company) to be used as a platform for teaching, homework assignment, and communication between the teachers and the students. The teachers and the students did not know about the DingTalk until they were informed of the upcoming online classes. The teachers encountered more technical obstacles than students in learning it. Nearly all students could quickly learn how to use the DingTalk on the mobile device through the tutorials, but some teachers, especially the elders, had difficulty using the application. Although the school had conducted several training sessions for the teachers, they still needed time to adapt to it. This also led to frequent technical failure in the online classes.

After online classes were on the right track, they became the daily routine for the teachers and the students, who interacted with each other through the use of new media technologies. Online education produces a virtual space where the teachers lose the observing power they once had in the traditional classroom; therefore, they had to develop some disciplinary mechanisms in order to monitor the real-time behavior of students. On the other hand, the students were empowered by new media technologies, which enabled them to have more autonomy and freedom in online classes. A new pattern of discipline between the teachers and the students appeared in the process of online education.

Disciplining online classes: Teachers’ strategies for control

The teachers attempted to reconfigure their disciplinary power in the online classroom to restore their authority and the behavioral norms of students as in the traditional offline teaching environment, but the effect could not be guaranteed. In the regular Chinese offline classrooms, a series of routines discipline students through the arrangements of time, space, and body rituals, such as setting the schedule of the day through the belling and timetable, restricting the space of students’ activities through the seat arrangement, control the body of students by specifying the dress, standard sitting and writing posture, and monitoring students’ behavior through the help of student cadres. However, most of these physical attempts were greatly weakened by the online environment. Some teachers even described online teaching as a process of “fighting wits and courage” with students. In order to maintain the teaching routine and urge students to complete online classes, the teachers developed a variety of new “strategies” to manage and control students, including space, time, ritual, and parent-involving discipline.

Space discipline

Space discipline in the online environment is realized in two ways: strict restrictions on camera use and offline on-site home visits. In Yu Middle School, the live broadcast mode was used in the early stage of online teaching. In this mode, the teacher was the “anchor” and students were the “audience.” Only when students were required to open their microphones could the teacher realize the “real” connection with students; otherwise, the teacher talked alone facing the computer. The power to see or not to see was in the hands of students, and the teacher’s ability to supervise students was weakened. Foucault (2007) believes that schools are disciplinary institutions with the architecture of “panoramic openness.” In traditional classrooms, the teacher uses the space rules (e.g., they stand on the podium and the students sit on their seats) to achieve the effect of comprehensive monitoring of students. However, in the live broadcasting mode, the teacher could not see the students while lecturing, and the rule of spatial arrangement and panoramic monitoring in traditional school environment could not be realized.

In order to better monitor the state of students, the live broadcast mode was replaced by video conference later. The teachers used cameras and formulated relevant rules to bring the online space into the scope of supervision. In the video conference mode, students must turn on the camera to show themselves and the surroundings on the screen. The teacher could see whether the students were physically present during the class time. The head teacher of a class even set up a “class supervision group” composed of parents and student cadres as extended gaze to supervise the students’ class attendance and homework. This is consistent with Foucault’s (1995) view that discipline is achieved through normalization and the discursive opposition of “obedient individuals” to “pathological subjects.” At the same time, some teachers also made strict rules of “showing face.” For example, Jun, a head teacher of the seventh grade, required that students’ face, hands, and books on the table must be visible during class:

I asked them to show their face, hands and notebooks in order to supervise better and see if the students were listening carefully, rather than sitting in front of the camera and doing other things (J23).

However, sometimes the effects are doubtful:

When I give a lecture, I will look at the dynamics of the students on the screen to see if they are listening and their state is OK, but this is only a relative remedy. You cannot monitor all student’s activities at the same time. You cannot control their attention (J20).

Some teachers also asked students to study online during the holidays. In order to create an atmosphere for students to study together, Ying, an English teacher of the ninth grade, suggested students join the online classroom when they were self-learning. During Chinese and English self-learning periods, the teachers would ask students to read aloud, and they checked whether students were doing so through the volume icon displayed in the video.

Besides the restrictions on the use of cameras, the teachers relied on the offline on-site home visit to supplement the online teaching. Nearly all teachers in the school visited the students’ homes during holidays. For Chinese educational administrators, parents and schools have a shared responsibility for students’ educational outcomes. Home visit is not only a means to inform the parents of their children’s progress and weaknesses in school but also a way to know about the students’ learning environment at home. It is a symbolic demonstration that the teachers care about the students and have power to know about everything about the students and the students’ family. Therefore, home visits are a mix of care, control, and power. For students with poor learning attitudes in the class, the teachers increased the frequency of home visits to two or three times a month. In the home visit process, the teachers communicated with parents and students face-to-face, and checked the students’ homework, notes in the books, and the usage of mobile phones. Some teachers even opened students’ social media accounts to examine their chat record with friends and the duration and frequency of playing games. Several teachers mentioned:

Once we visited a student’s home and checked the student’s mobile phone. The screen is covered by various games. We helped him/her unload them (J7).

The interpersonal interaction is now behind the scenes and hidden deeply. We need to capture some information by checking the chat records on students’ mobile phones, such as puppy love, paying to play games, homework plagiarism, and so on. We must check (J11).

Tian (J23), the head teacher of grade 9, personally registered an account for the Honor of King, a mobile game popular in China recently, and added students as friends to supervise their time spent on it; Jun (J27), a math teacher of grade 8, asked his son to teach him how to play the Honor of King in order to understand how the game operates, so that he could know about the games on students’ mobile phones during home visits. The teachers’ inspection of students’ mobile phone content was an intrusion into the students’ privacy. This was also part of the discipline process, an outcome of online teaching in rural areas. Due to the low educational level of the parents and their unfamiliarity with new media technologies, the teachers entered the students’ private space through home visits, expanding the control from the management of students’ learning to the supervision of students’ social life outside of the school.

Time discipline

“Check in” on the DingTalk application software and “time-limits” are two strategies used by the teachers for the time discipline. In traditional offline teaching environment, the school belling restricts students’ time arrangement through dividing the time of the day into fixed periods. For the online teaching in Yu Middle School, students were still required to arrange a day’s study and life in full accordance with the traditional learning schedule; the only difference is that the class sessions divided by school belling in offline environment were developed into online “check in” rules. They got up on time at 6:30 every morning, started early self-study at 7:00, and then continued with four regular classes from 8:00, three classes in the afternoon, and two self-study sessions in the evening until 21:10. The long hours of classes per day are very common for middle school students in China. The students must check in on the DingTalk multiple times every day, such as getting up in the morning, beginning of every class, uploading video of physical exercises, uploading course notes after each class to show that they have been listening to the teacher and concentrating on learning, and starting/completing homework. Every “check in” would leave a record on the platform, which became the documentation of the students’ performances. Foucault et al. (1990) believes that documentation has the constant and continuous power in controlling the subjects. The students in the middle school cannot escape from the continuous documentation and the teachers’ control.

The teachers in Yu School also developed a “time-limits” strategy to supplement the regular time control. Students were required to “check in” on time. For example, they should upload a photo of folded quilts at home after getting up and before the morning self-study session. They also needed to enter the virtual classroom on DingTalk to “check in” 5 minutes before class. Some teachers also mentioned that after the class, they required students to take photos and upload their course notes within a limited time of 2 minutes to supervise students’ listening efficiency. In this way, the teachers controlled students’ arrangement of daily time. Tian (J23), one of the teachers in grade 9, said:

I supervise the students’ early clock every morning. Once I found that some students uploaded the same picture repeatedly for several days, I would think of another method. Every night before going to bed, I arrange the contents that need to be checked in tomorrow in the DingTalk, such as letting them take selfies, making an OK gesture with their hand, putting out some fingers, making a face, or putting an English book at the head of the bed.

The teachers’ control strategy and the students’ resistance tactic are consistent with De Certeau’s argument that everyday life is a space where continuous domination and anti-domination coexist. The students used photos that were previously taken, thus allowing for the exercise of agency and the possibility of resistance. The teachers also realized the students’ resistance and changed their control strategy accordingly. Control and resistance were in a dialectic dynamic.

Ritual discipline

“Ritual” is also an important way of discipline. Carey (2008) defines it as an arrangement or procedure that centralizes a series of symbolic behaviors according to a specific cultural tradition. The ritual has the characteristics of repetition, standardization, performance, and transformation. One of the significant functions of rituals is social control—the realization of rules needs to be completed with the help of rituals. In the traditional offline school environment, the school realizes the discipline of the ritual through a series of activities such as the national flag-raising every Monday, class-break setting-up exercise, ocular gymnastics, speech competitions, and award ceremonies.

In the online environment, the school transferred some offline rituals online, such as the daily ocular gymnastics, Monday’s online national flag-raising ceremony, nightly class summary meeting, and occasional cooking competition. The online national flag-raising ceremony was a mandatory activity every Monday. The head teacher built a virtual classroom where the red national flag appeared on the screen, and the national anthem was played. Some teachers required the students to take photos or videos to record their participation in the online national flag-raising ceremony. Every evening’s summary meeting was a routine ceremony for each class. Some head teachers required both the students and their parents to participate. At the summary meeting, the head teacher summarized the students’ performance during the day, including homework and answering questions, and then praised the students who performed well and criticized the students who performed poorly. In this process, reward and punishment were the ways used for further strengthening the power of discipline.

This series of ritualized activities supplemented teachers’ online teaching management. On the one hand, ritualized activities can help to promote students’ spirit of study at home. On the other hand, they can ensure the smooth implementation of the rules put forward by the teachers for the purpose of controlling students’ daily learning and life.

Parent-involving discipline

During the pandemic, the parents were required to participate in their children’s learning process by the teachers, which has become a new means of discipline. The school’s first requirement for parents was to guarantee student’s material life because the schedule of work and rest in rural areas were quite different from those in schools. Yu Middle School had held parent meetings many times, requiring the parents to change their schedule to suit their children’s during online education. For example, arranging three meals a day according to the students’ timetable was a must. Furthermore, some teachers required the parents to supervise students’ study time, sleeping time, and homework. Also, the parents needed to participate in the summary meeting every evening and listen to the lectures offered by the school. The head teacher informed the parents of the students’ daily performance and homework.

However, most parents in the school are not good at disciplining the students. Students’ ability in the use of media technology is stronger than that of their parents; therefore, it was difficult for the parents to control their children’s media use. Some parents could only prevent the students from bringing their mobile phones into the bedroom when they were going to bed, while during the day, they could not stop the students from using mobile phones. A parent and a teacher mentioned the following, respectively:

He (student) was looking at his cell phone all the day, but we didn’t know what he was doing with it. When we told him not to use it, he replied that it was the teachers’ requirement (F28, a parent).

There are many students who only have their grandparents at home. The educational level of the elderly is not high. When they asked the students whether their homework is completed or not, the students always answered yes. When asked whether the online class is over or not, they always say yes (J9, a teacher).

The guardians could not effectively supervise students’ learning. On the one hand, the parents’ and grandparents’ educational level is very limited, and most of them only have a junior middle school diploma. On the other hand, some parents did not want to manage it. Tian (J23), a ninth grade English teacher, gave the parents nearly 20 phone calls a day. For example, if a student made a mistake, the teachers had to find his or her parents and get them informed. The telephone had become the primary way for the teachers to communicate with parents and supervise students. Rong (J24), an eighth grade Chinese teacher, also said that the contact with the parents increased considerably during the pandemic. However, phone calls only work for very few responsible parents. The teachers failed to find some parents for various reasons, or they did not care about their children’s learning. Hua, a math teacher explained:

Generally, if a student is late for class for a long time, do not hand in their homework, or the quality of homework is very poor, we go directly to the parents. At first, I tried to contact the students’ parents frequently, but then I reduced the frequency, because I find that contacting the parents does not work and some parents do not care about their children’s study at all. Some parents are just very worried, but do nothing to deal with it (J9).

Evading discipline: Students’ resistance

The power relationship between the teachers and students in online education is dynamic. The online environment empowered students against disciplinary power, although their resistance is still constrained by greater social power structures. Due to the advocacy of respecting and fully obeying teachers in Chinese traditional Confucian culture, teachers are in absolute authority. Therefore, most students dare not confront their teachers directly. According to De Certeau (2002), everyday tactics operate “blow by blow,” building micro-spaces of resistance. Therefore, instead of resisting the teachers directly, the students in Yu Middle School carried out a series of tactics in a sneaky way to resist discipline. These tactics include “exit the virtual classroom” and “cut off the microphone,” “edit and steal phones,” “pretend to be flustered,” and make fun of the teacher and deconstruct the serious atmosphere of the classroom.

Exit the virtual classroom and cut off the microphone

The students’ first tactics are “exit the virtual classroom” and “cut off the microphone.” During the online classes, students used the technical problems of media equipment and network as an excuse to avoid teachers’ management. For example, in the case of the teacher’s questioning during class, some students directly quit the online classroom or refused to connect the microphone if they did not want to answer or could not answer. When the teacher telephoned to ask about the reasons afterward, the student used the technical problems as an excuse, including “poor Internet connection” and “the mobile phone ran out of power.” When talking about the relationship with the teacher in online learning, a student of the eighth grade said:

The teacher will make a roll call and ask students to answer questions during class. Most of the students cannot answer the questions. Some directly refuse to connect their microphones. Then the teacher will ask someone else. After class, the teacher will call the students and ask them why they do not show up. Sometimes it depends on the teacher’s temper. To be specific, students will answer a teacher’s questions if the teacher’s temper is grumpy, otherwise they will directly refuse (S17).

Another student mentioned the specific tactics they used to evade answering questions:

Sometimes when the teacher wants to ask questions, the teacher will distribute the questions to different students in advance to let everyone prepare. When it comes to some student’s turn, he or she leaves the online class. When it is your turn to speak at a video conference, your face will appear on the mobile phone screen, and everyone’s eyes will focus on you. Some people are afraid of making a fool of themselves, so they will choose to leave silently. They will come back in a few minutes and skip the question (S16).

In order to prevent themselves from being supervised by the teacher, some students covered the camera of the mobile phone with transparent glue, resulting in blurred images, and the teacher could not see the actual state of the students. Some students deliberately stood still in front of the camera and did not make a sound when the teacher asked them to answer questions, pretending the network signal is bad. A student talked about why such tactics worked, “In this case, the teacher can’t help but ask someone else to answer, because the teacher can’t spend all his time on one person” (S16). A teacher also explained about the dilemma, “The student doesn’t connect online or doesn’t want to answer, and we can’t help it. We can only write down the student’s name and telephone number to ask what happened after class” (J24).

Edit and steal photos and pretend to be flustered

Online slang such as “edit photos” and “steal photos” has also been used by students in online classes. The students used the photo editing applications such as MeiTu, QinYan (Beautify Photos, in Chinese) on their mobile phones to resist the teachers’ control. For example, some students did not complete their course notes and homework on time, so they asked their classmates for help and “steal photos.” Some students handed in those photos after changing lighting, adding a filter, changing the date on the homework, or adding their names through photo editing applications, which made them different from the original. Some students handed them in directly, while others did the first half of the homework by themselves, and left the second half borrowed from the photos of other classmates’ homework.

In order to prevent students from copying each other’s homework, the teachers prohibited students from communicating in DingTalk and adding each other as friends. However, students could build chat groups in other social media applications, discuss homework, or copy homework. Besides photo editing applications, other question answering applications, such as Zuoyebang (Homework Helper, in Chinese), are also good helpers for students to resist teachers’ management. When students took a picture of their homework and uploaded on the application, the answers would appear on the screen immediately. In this way, they did not need to do the homework on their own. From “ask the teacher for help” to “search the Internet for help,” students have changed their dependence on teachers’ knowledge. Foucault (2002) believes that knowledge can produce power; power and knowledge are directly interrelated. The teachers’ authority was weakened when the students did not need to rely on them as the sole source of knowledge. Feng (J25) was a physics teacher in the eighth grade. When he arranged the homework, he changed the numbers in the original questions in order to prevent students from using the search software:

Obviously, it can be seen that many students just copy the answers online. Every time I change the numbers in the test questions, some students still hand in the exact answers without modification.

Some teachers have reduced or canceled homework or did not grade homework seriously because they were tired of students’ cheating and plagiarism (the teachers in these schools do not have access to anti-plagiarism software). In addition, the frequency of exams was reduced to the minimal level. New media technologies make plagiarism easy and enabled the students to circumvent the teachers’ control. However, such tactics are harmful to the students’ learning.

Rui (S33), a student in the eighth grade, also mentioned the strategy of “pretending to be flustered” that she used. Sometimes she did not complete her homework before the deadline, so she first submitted a blank homework and finished her homework before the teacher found out. When the teacher found that her homework was blank and came to ask her, she pretended to be flustered, apologizing to the teacher and saying that she did not realize that, and then resubmitted the finished homework. The students created three limericks to describe the daily online learning: “reciting is equivalent to no homework, dictation is equivalent to copying, and doing homework is equivalent to finding answers.” They vividly described some students’ online learning experience. The dilemma also points to the shortcomings that many assignments and homework in Chinese middle schools do not require critical thinking.

Make fun of the teacher and deconstruct the serious atmosphere of the classroom

In the virtual classroom, the students also used tactics to interfere with online teaching, such as repeating the teacher’s pet phrases and posting numerous praise and comments on the live broadcast platform to make fun of the teacher and deconstruct the serious atmosphere of the classroom. A student joked about what they did in the online class:

Our physics teacher has a pet phrase “very good.” Sometimes after the teacher finishes a knowledge point and asks us if we understand it, the students will frantically reply “very good” in the message area and can’t stop (S16).

The teachers were also aware of such tactics of the students, for example, a teacher mentioned the following:

At the beginning of the online class, the students may feel that the form is very novel, and then they keep posting “likes.” They also leave messages casually in the live room to interfere with the class, and they did it intentionally. Sometimes even 10 minutes after the class has started, some students still reply “well received” (J25).

These tactics did not confront the teacher’s power but used humor to show that the students are equals of the teacher because they could even make fun of the teacher, who could not resist but was amused by it. Although the rural students’ academic performance is not as good as the peers in urban schools in China due to social economic factors, these smart tactics demonstrate that they are intelligent to find the check lines out of the online class that physically separates them and the teacher.

All these tactics adopted by the students in the online class are spontaneous and individual, and they depend on the collusion and dissimulation of other students to cover them up. They together resist the teachers’ control and the “panopticon” set by the surveillance features embedded in new media technologies. These tactics are the “hidden transcripts” (Sccot, 2007). Although the teachers’ disciplinary power has been diminished by the students’ resistance, the freedom they gained does not necessarily lead to good results. The students did not take advantage of the freedom to learn things that may be helpful for their study but instead usually spent the time on entertainment videos and games. Therefore, the temporary freedom they gained may have resulted in negative consequences and greater panopticon control by the society in their future life because students’ success is largely determined by the entrance exams at various levels in China.

Discussion and conclusion

Through the case study of a rural middle school in China, this paper explores the online education practice of teachers and students during the COVID-19 pandemic. This article examines how the teachers and the students engage the online class and how new media technology influences the power relationship between them. This study contributes to understanding online education, a new form of mediated communication, in two significant aspects.

Firstly, the findings show that a dialectical perspective of control and resistance is more applicable for understanding online learning. Our results are consistent with De Certeau’s (2002) who posited that Foucault’s (1995) analysis of power overestimates the effectiveness of structural control and ignores individuals’ resistance in micro-practices. The teachers and the students in Yu Town used a series of strategies and tactics to realize the creative use of new media technology, which may have tentatively reshaped the power relationship between them. Haddon (2006) summarized three levels of the use of information technology in daily life: producing innovative explanatory words and symbols; developing innovative ways of using information technology; and realizing the control over ICTs and control the way others use ICTs or resist others’ control over themselves. The teachers and students employed the particular features of media technologies in online teaching and learning. The teachers tried to strengthen the supervision of students through disciplines on space, time, ritual, and involving parents. The students resisted through a series of tactics, such as “exiting the virtual classroom” and “cutting off the microphone,” “editing the photos” and “stealing the photos,” “pretend to be flustered,” and making fun of the teacher and deconstruct the serious atmosphere of the classroom, to temporarily escape from the teachers’ control and indirectly expressed their dissatisfaction with the online class. This is consistent with Hogelucht and Geist’s (2009) finding that students’ misbehavior often served as a strategy for voicing dissatisfaction, and the various forms of discipline used by the teacher reflected the teacher’s and students’ desire for change in the online classroom conditions.

Secondly, our study shows that freedom and autonomy gained by resistance may not necessarily lead to good results or emancipation. New media technologies offer the potential that teachers and students can connect online and communicate anytime and anywhere in education. Many people acclaim that Internet technology has brought rich resources to realize class leap for disadvantaged students. However, our findings show that the impact of the Internet on the rural students may not necessarily be positive. For instance, although “stealing photos” or “editing photos” from online can alleviate the students’ burden of homework and help them escape from the teachers’ control, such plagiarism is harmful to the students. Due to the huge gap between the urban and rural areas in China, Chinese students in rural areas are at the bottom of the social ladder, resulting in poor, unattractive rural schools, inadequate teacher training, and ineffective school management. The implementation of online education has exacerbated this situation and further increased the gap between rural and urban students in China. On the one hand, this gap is due to a lack of financial and technical resources, such as the lack of equipment for online courses and the lack of technical training. On the other hand, this gap is caused by the teachers’ and the students’ low level of motivation for online teaching and learning. As a result of their creative use of media technologies to resist the discipline of online class, the students have created their own obstacle for growth in the social ladder.

Thus, although media technologies and online education have enabled the rural students’ agency and resistance, such agency and resistance also have unintended consequence of reproducing the hegemonic system. More specifically, such resistance is consistent with the predicament—while possessing the ability to tentatively sabotage the dominant power relations on surface, these subjects are still unable to fully question the deep structure of the society. Thus, the Chinese rural students end up reproducing the very system that they are dissatisfied with. The important point here, however, is not to resolve the dialectic between control and resistance but rather to explore how the tensions and contradictions that are revealed in the dialectic can create possibilities for social change and transformation (Mumby, 2005).

This paper also has several limitations. Firstly, the study only focuses on the online class practice of rural students, without bringing that of urban students into comparison, which may not fully highlight the uniqueness of rural students’ experience. Further research that examines the differences would provide more insights for understanding the relationship between media technologies and power relations. Secondly, most of the data come from interviews because the school had returned to regular offline classes when the research was conducted. More observational research of online classes is an area for future work to inform practice.