Young children’s negotiation of language policies and multilingual curriculum at an ethnic minority elementary school in rural China

Abstract

Through interpreting the status of Hoche language and cultural practices from community voices, this ethnographic case study conducted in a minority language school centers on five Han and Hoche ethnic minority children’s positions toward multi-language learning. My research explores how these children negotiate the policies and multilingual curriculum that illuminates the multilayered tensions between local issues and global transformation. Findings indicate that policies situate Hoche as a romantic representation of the past, whereas the narratives I gathered from Hoche and Han children’s attitudes and ideologies about language show that younger generations are oriented toward future opportunities and influenced by globalization. This work contributes to scholarship on the education of minority children during a period of rapid industrialization by extending our understanding of ethnicity, diversity, and inclusivity issues via children’s perspectives. Shedding light onto the lives of Hoche and other ethnic minority children’s language practices, this paper is a call to urgently address power inequities in the ideologies and pedagogies enacted in service of Indigenous reclamation.

Keywords

ethnic minority globalization language policy multilingual curriculum young children

Introduction

China is a country with multi-ethnic integration and development, including the dominant Han group¹ and 55 minority ethnic groups. With fewer than 4000 people, Hoche is one of the smallest ethnic minorities situated in the rural areas of North China. Hoche people traditionally undertook subsistence practices unique to their environment for securing food and producing clothing and other necessary items (Xie and Gan, 2017). Since 1950, the Chinese government has managed the construction of residential houses for Hoche and other local residents as part of civilization and modernization project (Zheng, 2010). Because of the maintenance of folk customs, traditional food, handicrafts, and the beauty of the area, the town where the Hoche live has become a famous tourist spot in response to China’s economic development policies (Han, 2009; Zheng, 2010).

The position of the Hoche language and culture in China today

The national language of the Hoche ethnic group is the Hoche language and no text symbols are used to record the language. Since this language belongs to the Manchu language of the hypothetical Altaic language family, much of the vocabulary in Hoche language is similar to Manchu language (Zheng, 2010). The Machu language was widely used during the Qing Dynasty (1636–1912), but now very few Hoche people can speak their language. After approximately 300 years living together with the Han people, Mandarin has become the language generally used by the Hoche, which is typical for ethnic minority groups in China. Furthermore, with the vigorous promotion of Mandarin and English, Hoche language is becoming virtually invisible.

In China today, Mandarin is the language of education, government, and public service. It is also used in all standardized tests and has become a prerequisite for employment (Zhang and Tsung, 2019). In 2019, the Ministry of Education announced that nearly 80% of people in China are capable of speaking Mandarin (Global Times, 2019). Other main languages in China include Yue (Cantonese), Xiang (Hunanese), and the Min, Gan, Wu, and Kejia dialects, but their use is decreasing. Stemming from the pressure of modernization and globalization, English is being given more attention on the linguistic map and is taught as a second language in schools since 2001² (Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China (MOE), 2001). This is even the case in rural regions transformed by the pressures of globalization. As Yu (2017) stated, the knowledge-based economy privileges English and motivates teachers, administrators, and parents to hold a utilitarian attitude toward English learning.

Policies impacting minority languages and cultures in the Chinese education system

Within the Mandarin and English language scholarship, there is an emerging discussion around the significance of promoting ethnic identity education. In education, curricula have begun an ongoing transition from accommodation to accelerated assimilation, reinforcing the ideal of one nation at the expense of diversity (Zhou, 2010: 489, as cited in Andrew, 2018). Authors argue that more and more ethnic minority children are losing their ethnic identities as they progress in their education, and that this is concerning since standardized curricula addressing national unity are replacing diverse curricula in ethnic minority areas (Cherng et al., as cited in Stevens and Dworkin, 2019).

Such concerns have been nominally considered in national policies³ issued by the Central Office and the General Office of the State Council that are designed to preserve minority languages and are taken up by some of the administrators in ethnic minority areas, especially the groups who do not have written forms of their dialects like the Hoche. In 2017, the Central Office and the General Office of the State Council issued the “Using Appropriate Methods to Revitalize Ethnic Minority Languages” and “Implementation of the Chinese Traditional Culture Development” policies, which stated that the central government intends to promote and popularize standard Mandarin and the use of standard written characters, as well as to protect the heritage of diverse minority cultures through launching programs designed to protect the ethnic minorities’ distinctive ways of life and disseminate their national languages and classical literature.⁴ Although these policies are presented as playing an important role in promoting national unity, social stability, and diverse cultural integration (Leibold and Chen, 2014; Postiglione, 2013) and simultaneously claim to protect minority cultures and languages within the Chinese education system (Ma, 2019; Xia, 2019), as discussed in the findings, the tensions between these agendas were indeed the dilemmas and challenges that Hoche people were confronting.

The curriculum of multilingual and multicultural education at Hoche school

In alignment with the national policies, the Hoche school is a unique embodiment of Chinese culture as it promotes Mandarin and English while incorporating a curriculum that highlights minority diversity to revitalize and reclaim Hoche language. At present, the Hoche Minzu school has achieved China’s standardized 9-year compulsory education. Hoche families are subject to this systematized formal education in their regions, a standardization which is intended to improve the vitality of Hoche (Fan, 2016; Zheng, 2010). Hoche adults, mostly in the generation of grandparents, continue to speak Hoche, however, globalization policies and contradictory social policies have contributed to rapid language shift. As the call from the Central Office to promote the protection, application, and revitalization of minorities’ languages, the Hoche language has been integrated into the school’s language curriculum in an attempt to preserve it (He, 2005, 2007). Therefore, in this Hoche Minzu school, the Hoche children are required to attend lessons that teach about Hoche history, language, arts, and festivals while the Han children have the option to join the Hoche culture classes. As observed in the school, these classes are scheduled for about 45 minutes once every 1–2 weeks, but they are often canceled when more pressing matters such as exams arise. This curriculum is designed to keep it in line—on paper at least—with national policy for ethnic language preservation.

Literature review

As part of Chinese national policy to protect ethnic cultures and heritage as a national economic resource (Xue and Li, 2020) and in response to international demands for respect for multiculturalism (Wiggan and Hutchison, 2009), ethnic minority schools in China including the Minzu School have been founded to maintain diverse minority languages and traditional practices through a multicultural curriculum. Over the last decades, many schools and colleges, particularly where ethnic minorities live, have explored and implemented similar programs across the country to promote diversity education (Cao and Yang, 2021; Hong, 2009; Li and Li, 2019; Liu, 2021; Wu, 2019). Influenced by the multicultural programs created as a response to policies of protecting diverse minority cultures, an increased amount of research has centered on the specific cases, practical strategies, and/or theoretical explorations of the multicultural curriculum in ethnic minority schools. Huang (2009) explained how ethnic culture and the bilingual education systems were established to strengthen Shui culture; similarly, motivated by the need to advocate for Tujia ethnic culture, Wu (2019) investigated the educational value of the Tujia national curriculum from the perspectives of ethnic cultural consciousness and children’s developmental domains. Specific to the context of my study, Han (2009), Zheng (2010), and Liu and Li (2004) considered the status of Hoche cultural education and advocated for multicultural curricula to preserve the transmission of their ethnic heritage. However, these studies mainly focused on ethnic education within the minority school and did not analyze children’s and local people’s evaluation of this curriculum. Neither Han nor ethnic minority children are involved in the discussion of the multicultural programs, even though they are the intended beneficiaries of these programs. Although the literature highly encourages the creation of ethnic cultural curricula and provides suggestions for engaging strategically with local families, it is grounded in teachers’, administrators’, and policy makers’ beliefs of what counts as a successful multicultural curriculum and how to activate the participation of students and parents.

Moreover, very little published research focuses on understanding education of the ethnic minority children in the broader context of emerging social politics and economic culture. Influenced by educational expansion, urbanization, migration, and industrialization, minority societies have been undergoing fast social, economic, and cultural changes (Guo et al., 2018; Stockman, 2013). However, these rapid changes are interdependent and intertwined with the school education and community cultural discourse (Fujita-Round, 2019; Grey, 2021). Education for ethnic minority children is by no means an isolated issue that can be solved in school-based ethnic culture curriculum. It is a complicated issue at the intersection of nationality, ethnicity, age, class, economic status, and regionality (Hinton, 2011; Yu, 2017; Zhou and Hill, 2009).

In order to analyze how children negotiate the multicultural curriculum and broader globalization, adopting Foucault’s (1976, 1980) theory of power relations aids this study in understanding the educational systems and multicultural curriculum, which are structured as sites that implicate power relations, as well as how these structures impact Hoche children’s experiences. As Foucault (1976, 1980) discusses that power and knowledge are inextricably connected, I use this framework to show how power negotiations are interrelated to an individual’s construction of their ideologies and identities. Children’s language learning and their corresponding practices construct power, status, and privilege (Foucault, 1980), which are also located in discourses that convey rereadings, redefinitions, and reinterpretations of subjectivity (Blaise, 2005). This theoretical framework enables exploration of those norms that shape Hoche children’s social practices and how Hoche children accept and/or negotiate those norms within their diverse curriculum. In a site of schooling, Hoche and Han children prioritize subjects and negotiate the multicultural curriculum to reshape their national identities in relation to broader power discourses, including doing power in the form of negotiation. In the study, they are negotiating what their government, societies, and institutions expect them to become, and are rethinking their transformative roles from the local and global and the past and the present.

Methods

Grounded in 5 months of multimodal data collection from ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the educational practices and policies at the Minzu elementary school⁵ through amplifying Hoche and Han children’s voices to see how they negotiate a multilingual and multicultural curriculum as China undergoes massive shifts to capitalist practices (Day and Schneider, 2018). With this purpose in mind, this study adopted a transdisciplinary approach (Camponovo et al., 2023; Mitchell and Moore, 2018; Moulaert et al., 2011) that focuses on perspectives of the children themselves and considers the intersectional perspectives of the complexity of broader political, economic, and cultural context through a local and global lens (Bloch et al., 2018; Huaman and Martin, 2020; Nespor, 2013).

Participants and informants

The research was conducted in a minority language school, which is a designated ethnic minority school that serves both the Han and local ethnic minorities. This was the only public elementary school that served all the nearby villages; there are 300 children and 38 of whom were Hoche children while the rest of the population were of Han, Manchu, Korean, and Oroqen minorities. Central to my study are five children that I recruited⁶ from a first-grade class. They are Mei and Xue, 8-year-old Han dominant children, and Jiao, Xin, and Yong, 7-year-old Hoche ethnic minority children. To further gather information about the multicultural curriculum and local policies, I conducted interviews with informants including the lead teacher of the first-grade class, the teacher of Hoche language and traditional culture, the principal, Xin’s mother, and Jiao’s grandmother. This study gained ethics approval from the Pennsylvania State University IRB office.

Data collection and analysis

As a form of inquiry, case studies hold strengths such as reflexivity, depth, and currency, which are essential to my research (Dyson and Genishi, 2005; Stake, 2000). As Tedlock (2000) illustrates, the strength of the ethnographic approach is that firsthand interaction with people in their everyday lives can result in a better understanding of their values, beliefs, behaviors, and motivations. To have an in-depth understanding of the participants’ viewpoints on the multicultural curriculum, I employed dynamic ethnographic methods, including daily field notes, walking with students, artifact collection, document analysis, unstructured observations, and formal and informal interviews. My place-based observations and ethnographic methods encompass open perspectives, embrace possibilities for negotiation, perceive complexity in particular contexts (Bassey, 1999; Simons, 1996), and allow for an in-depth description and analysis of a bounded system (Merriam, 2009).

The data discussed here was collected on site and in person at the Hoche elementary just before the school lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. I gathered data in Mandarin and translated it into English. The ethnographic field notes, interview transcriptions, and spontaneous conversations were coded to sort, compare, and identify conceptual patterns to further interpret the meanings and interrelationships of data. With focused coding (Emerson et al., 2011), data was reorganized to identify specific themes, which presented possible ways of interpreting how children received, accommodated, and negotiated institutionalized messages about the values of ethnic minority language and culture. Bearing in mind that people’s words and actions are “multi-voiced and relative” to social frames and discourse, I constructed the authentic meanings of their words from the perspective of local indications of a larger social context (Graue et al., 2001; Tobin, 2000).

Placing children’s perspectives at the center with a transdisciplinary approach

Furthermore, throughout the data collection, I adopted Mandell’s strategy of the “least-adult role” to take an active observer’s position when entering into children’s worlds (Corsaro, 2003; Henward, 2015; Mandell, 1988) and became accepted as a sort of “big kid” (Corsaro, 2003) and/or “older sister” (Zhu et al., 2021). Through this role, I encouraged the children’s active participation in data co-production and created opportunities for mutual understanding between my child participants and me to facilitate the transdisciplinary approach (Mitchell and Moore, 2018; Moulaert et al., 2011). As explained by Camponovo et al. (2023), this transdisciplinary approach involves children actively participating and co-producing the data while providing them space to reflect on their experiences, share valuable data, and develop a critical viewpoint. Through prioritizing and privileging children’s own knowledge constructions about the multicultural curriculum via the transdisciplinary approach, child participants were provided with inquiry-driven opportunities to rethink the new perspectives regarding their current learning experiences. This reflexive sharing process opened more space to both theorize and actualize the construction of multicultural education and to engage with larger social issues (James, 2007; Wang, 2020).

Positionality of the researcher

Acknowledging the potential challenges of researching an ethnic minority school as a non-minority researcher, I reflected and negotiated my researcher role to better understand participants’ indigenous meanings in the research process. As Olsen (2018) claimed, as a non-Indigenous scholar you must decenter yourself because the decentering is undoing privilege and Indigenous participants ought to remain in the center (4, 8); in recognizing my own perspective as a privileged researcher, I decentered myself (Olsen, 2018; Skille, 2021) to allow the children to speak and act for themselves instead of interpreting this from an outside point of view. Although I am not an ethnic minority, this does not render the research invalid or inappropriate; rather, admitting this fact may help me “position myself as a distinctive, researching self” (Dyson and Genishi, 2005: 57) and be more sensitive to the cultural differences and the local contexts.

Listening to children’s voices: Uncovering negotiation of the multicultural curriculum

Han children’s perspectives: “We all should speak Mandarin”

During my field work, I was able to observe the Hoche language and culture class three times as well as sit in on their classes of other subjects. I would also walk with the children during breaks and interact with them. The hall transition time provided an opportunity not only to talk with the children about the classes, but to observe and discuss how Hoche culture was on display in the hallways.

The (lack of) perceived value of the Hoche classes to the Han majority students was reflected in my conversations with Mei and Xue, two of the first grade Han girls who were my focal students. In one of our hallway conversations, they made it clear that they did not want to learn the Hoche language because they did not think it was useful to spend time learning it. Mei and Xue regarded participating in a Hoche language session as a recreational experience that would create more time together with me rather than a meaningful session to voluntarily join.

I asked Mei what would happen if she were required to take the language class, and she expressed her concerns, “I would be worried that if I am forced to learn it, my final exam performance might be affected. What I worried about most was that my grades would drop, and my teacher would disqualify me from the Young Pioneers group. I cannot let this happen!” The Young Pioneers group, a prestigious youth organization run by the Communist Youth League, is open only to the top performing students. It was obvious that Mei considered Mandarin as the truly valued language and that even the school posters that say “Speak civilized; Speak Mandarin” make it clear that any language other than Mandarin is uncivilized. She believed that Mandarin is not just one of the subjects to be tested in examinations, but a language that is civilized, highly recognized by society, and thus vigorously promoted and publicized by the school.

Xue, the other girl of Han nationality, also talked about her viewpoints regarding learning the Hoche language:

Xue:

If my Hoche friends do not speak Mandarin, I might not play with them anymore since I don’t understand what they are talking about.

Author:

Might it be a good idea for you to learn Hoche? Are you interested?

Xue:

I prefer to learn English.

Author:

Could you tell me why?

Xue:

Because English is more useful than Hoche. If I can speak English fluently, I could visit many countries, and I could talk with them in English.

Xue’s belief that English was a more useful language for travel was not unreasonable, but it was also influenced by an appraisal of the intelligence of Hoche students related to their Mandarin skills. She believed that the Hoche children in the class were not very smart or successful:

The lead teacher always reprimanded them, saying that they should be ashamed of the Hoche ethnic group. Some of them were either poor in mathematics . . . or they couldn’t speak Mandarin as accurately as others. I often don’t understand what they say. Anyway, because of their poor grades, I prefer to play with others who have better academic grades.

Listening to Mei and Xue’s perspectives on the Hoche language class provoked me to further reflect on children’s social values through their responses to the multi-language curriculum. Mei and Xue, who are two of the top ranked students, value instruction in Mandarin and English much more than Hoche, a language that they did not regard as useful, valuable, or civilized. Their responses portrayed Hoche children and their language as deficient, broken, and inadequate (Tuck, 2009), which is typically the situation for minority languages in locations where there has been a history of marginalization (Yu, 2017; Zhang and Tsung, 2019). Furthermore, not only would the Hoche language not be tested in the final exam, but in the long run, this language could not bring them practical employment, for example, to “visit many countries” and to “talk with [people in other countries] in English,” as Xue replied. They were eager to learn a language that could facilitate and officially demonstrate their intellectual growth and improve their abilities to step into internationalization and modernization (Wiggan and Hutchison, 2009). Being dedicated to achieving decent Mandarin and English grades, to these girls who are not Hoche and to their teachers as well, is the most prioritized and valuable task.

Although this school was established as a bilingual education institution to promote ethnic diversity and equality, I learned in my interview with the school principal that all students must study Mandarin, English, and mathematics daily according to policy. The home language of the Hoche children is overwhelmingly Mandarin. As He (2014) claims, Mandarin linguistic imperialism expands the “Chinese state power and the power of the market into all corners of China. . . which has slowly diluted the prominence of minority language” (p. 45). Han students explicitly expressed that Mandarin is the “civilized language” and Hoche children “couldn’t speak Mandarin as accurately as others.” The multicultural curriculum aimed to maintain ethnic diversity and language equality has been altered to aggravate inequality, since Mandarin is valued as civilized and legitimate, but Hoche language is perceived to be the opposite. The once-a-week Hoche language class does not stop the Hoche language from becoming more endangered or even dying since the curriculum emphasizes the unity much more than diversity, nevertheless it lacks local content and the social reality in the area (Wiggan and Hutchison, 2009). Hoche language is taken as a second language that could be learned through occasional school-focused lessons rather than a language that Hoche children acquire and use outside of school in social interaction for real purposes, which means that the curriculum is by no means an authentic portal to implement Hoche in their “normal, ongoing, community-based ethnocultural lives” (Fishman, 2013: 484). The teaching of the Hoche language assured funding from the national government, but actual skill in speaking the language is not as important as speaking Mandarin and English within the wider community.

Hoche children’s perspectives: Balancing Hoche revitalization and belonging in the Han dominant community

Two of the Hoche children shared their perspectives on Hoche language learning. Xin responded to whether she had a passion to learn the Hoche language: “I like the Hoche language. It’s interesting! And my mom has paid my tuition and the electric bill, the money would be a waste if I don’t learn it.” Another Hoche boy, Yong, said,

Ms. Wang, I didn’t know which ethnicity I was until my father told me. I like being a Hoche. But I don’t believe I am a Hoche since we are no different from Han. My father asked me to learn it, and personally I think it’s interesting to speak a language that nobody understands. It’s cool.

The Hoche children’s relation to learning the Hoche language seemed hardly more engaged than that of the Han children who chose to partake in these classes. While it was novel or perhaps interesting, the fact is the language played no discernible role in their lives outside of school or in the futures they imagined for themselves. According to Xia (2019) and Xie (2005), the widespread use of Mandarin has been an important goal in school education in ethnic minority areas. To the administrators of local government, Mandarin is beneficial to stimulate economic growth and find a way out of poverty, as fluency in Mandarin is a requirement for prosperity and integration within these communities (Law, 2017). However, over time this policy has provoked ethnic minority groups to speak Mandarin in their daily lives and as the communicative function of their ethnic language diminished, as did their enthusiasm for revitalizing it. The Hoche boy, Yong, never heard his family members communicate in Hoche—he even doubted if he was a Hoche since his way of life is the same as the Han children.

To collect more data on the children’s perspectives of the display of Hoche culture in the school’s public spaces, I took several Hoche and Han children to a hallway that they didn’t typically traverse. On the walls and in cabinets in this hall were exhibits of traditional Hoche artwork. Using this multi-sensory walking method allowed children to experience embodied presence through interactions with Hoche cultural materials (Powell, 2017, 2020). After visiting this hallway, I invited them to share their thoughts out loud or through drawing. Jiao, a Hoche girl, gave me a portrait of herself after the visit, and described her artwork, “The girl in the drawing is wearing a dress. She loves strawberries and cakes. Reading is one of her hobbies. She can speak Mandarin and English. Smart and pretty!” Following her descriptions, I wondered why Jiao did not mention the Hoche language, and she replied, “I don’t know, I only know that I should learn Mandarin and English.”

In this first-grade class of 39 children, there are only 7 Hoche students in this assimilated Han dominant school. Ironically, the school is called “Hoche Minzu school,” but it appears that the Hoche culture is appropriated primarily to advertise the uniqueness and creativity of the minority heritage, constructed as a static and semi-interesting “fact.” Rarely are opportunities provided to these Hoche children that offer traditional or innovative forms of Hoche culture that strengthen the language’s preservation. Further, the actual promotion of the Hoche culture in rarely visited halls and a designated Hoche classroom, with a curriculum that was regularly sidelined for more pressing matters, clearly communicated the marginalization and devaluation of the culture in the face of larger messages of homogeneity as the truest expression of national unity.

Although the policy of protecting the heritage of diverse minority cultures addressed ethnic preservation, in practice the designation of Hoche was far more about the commercialization of the culture than an expressed desire of the community. That said, there were also a few Hoche children who did seem to develop a distinct perception of Hoche as significant and showed eagerness to disseminate Hoche culture to the group. For example, after a Hoche language lesson, Yong could not wait to teach his Han friends who did not attend the Hoche classes. He voluntarily presented the vocabularies and sentences of greetings outside the class to share what he experienced as meaningful. He also began to engage in identifying with ideas of being a Hoche and the beauty of their language.

For the other Hoche children like Jiao and Xin, learning Hoche appeared to me to be a fun language session rather than an opportunity to learn and spread their culture. Over the time I observed them, they worked very hard to achieve decent grades in Mandarin, English, and Mathematics lest their friends and the main teacher looked down on them due to their poor performance. Their Hoche knowledge was not valued by the teacher, the Han children, and even some Hoche children since they did not view Hoche language as a great asset for growth in their future career life. Mandarin and English are the languages that have symbolic roles in globalization and internationalization (Fujita-Round, 2019). Children’s experiences of learning Hoche may be at individual level, however, “they are most often local examples of universally reported phenomena of dominated minority groups, including the adoption of negative majority-group attitudes toward minorities by members of the minority group themselves” (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer, 1998: 66). As Hoche children, Jiao and Xin’s negotiation of the multicultural curriculum and preference to learn the more “important” subjects shows how the school and system delegitimizes Hoche knowledge. Most of the coursework and assessment are centered on the subjects that would provide children a “portal to a better and successful life,” as the lead teacher commented. The teachers, school, and the whole system created a hierarchy in which the Hoche language is ranked below the exam-oriented school culture (Stevens, 2021).

The seemingly diverse and inclusive curriculum was not actually serving the goals of engaging Hoche culture in the ethnic minority school; the best they have done is to exhibit the Hoche artifacts and pictures in the display boards covered with glass windows on the second floor, where the first and second graders rarely visited. In fact, instructions in Mandarin, English, and Hoche are not just methods to facilitate students’ academic learning, but more importantly, they are part of a larger project to mirror the social values and “truths” of society. Language and the corresponding lessons construct power, status, and privilege (Foucault, 1980), thus the school orients the cultural power relations and structural values and ideology within society according to the “multicultural” values of the school (Foucault, 1976). As Brayboy and Lomawaima (2018) claim, schools are a battleground in which knowledge, values, and children’s lives are on the line. The Hoche Minzu school values teaching major subjects over Hoche knowledge despite the fact that it claims to maintain diversity and inclusion in education. Mei and Xue, as Han children, reacted to the multicultural curriculum by not learning Hoche themselves and expecting their Hoche friends to speak Mandarin. Jiao, Xin, and Yong, as Hoche children with limited exposure to Hoche language, also had to negotiate the multicultural curriculum since it did not provide them more authentic opportunities to learn Hoche. Children’s responses reflect how current situations are manifestations of ongoing negotiation with politics in relation to the multicultural curriculum. Their negotiations also help to reveal how policies and localized social practices as forms of knowledge production impact children’s formation of their subjectivity.

Incorporating the greater community’s perspective: The pulls of the past and the future

To place the children’s responses to learning the Hoche language in the larger community context, I also interviewed child participants’ guardians and teachers. Observing and collaborating with these informants not only allowed me to glimpse how local people responded to the policies of revitalizing Hoche language in the school and the broader community in real-time (Anthony-Stevevns and Grino, 2018), but also helped me to make meaning of how the polices and social and economic changes impacted children’s negotiations of the curriculum. In other words, discussions with teachers, families, and community members shed light on the interpretations of children’s perspectives and further cultivate an understanding of multicultural education in the local Hoche community.

Jiao’s grandmother, a Hoche who had lived in the community since she was born, kindly introduced her Hoche family members to me, and talked about Hoche culture. She explained:

It would be great if my kids have been offered opportunities to learn the Hoche language. You know, it will be useful to know another language in the job market. My eldest granddaughter . . . stands out as a unique ethnic minority since she performed a Hoche song during carnivals, which impressed teachers and peers.

Author: What about Mandarin and English? Do you think they are equally important as the Hoche language?

Grandmother: Definitely English and Mandarin are more important when you enter the job market and graduate from school to pursue a career . . . And I know the importance of English. It is the required ability for my grandchildren to pursue promising careers.

Although the grandmother’s answer clearly showed her pride in her granddaughter’s ability to speak some Hoche, it is worth noticing that her emphasis was on the practical benefits the language brought to her granddaughter which could facilitate her applications to student organizations and her social network communication. She also expressed the importance of English and Mandarin in the job market competition. The ability to speak Hoche could certainly serve as a unique talent, but English proficiency was a more solid ability that she truly appreciated.

Xin’s mother, a Hoche woman who is married to a Han, also shared her perspectives:

We all know we should take the responsibility to use and spread the language, but very few of us take it to action. Honestly, only my grandparents are able to speak Hoche fluently, the rest of my family can either speak some words and phrases or cannot speak it at all. It is a huge loss to our culture.

When I asked if she would like her daughter Xin to learn Hoche, she was silent for a moment and responded, “If she has the passion to learn it, why not? But I know my daughter, she may only get interested for a couple of days, then she quits. I prefer her to spend more time learning the main subjects, which will bring her more benefits as she grows up.”

Children’s views mirrored the adults’, such as Xin’s mother and Jiao’s grandmother, who believed that learning Mandarin, English, and mathematics are critically important in the industrial modern society. Mainstream policies and localized social practices as knowledge production impact children’s and local residents’ formation of their subjectivity. Their perspectives on learning Hoche reflect negotiation with the larger political and economic landscape. The lack of authenticity is clear in the comments of Jiao’s grandmother: “We are a really small group. We cannot stop the loss of Hoche. We have to find ways to fit into what’s happening. Few people speak Hoche, but if we have a group of kids to speak Hoche, then they can perform the language to the inspector and get our check.” Her response shows recognition that school officials are not earnest about language preservation. Their curriculum, with an emphasis on arts and crafts, festivals, and the barest uses of Hoche language, positions the children as romantic representatives of the past, a dying culture. Though it bears the purpose of maintaining Hoche culture, the curriculum does not provide Hoche children authentic language acquisition opportunities to contextualize bilingualism into Hoche peoples’ dynamic lives and social reality. As discussed in the paper, the curriculum failed to respect and serve the real purposes of reclaiming Hoche culture sustainably. Thus, the efforts that the curriculum tried to make are incomplete and exclude dialogical engagements with local Hoche communities for ideological clarification (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer, 1998; Phyak, 2021). Referring to Fishman’s (1991) graded intergenerational disruption scale (GIDS), Hoche language revitalization cannot be separated from operations of the “local and regional educational, work sphere, mass media and governmental services” (p. 485), which means that meaningful actions should be taken on individual, family, local community, and larger societal levels to preserve Hoche continuity.

As Hoche people were excluded in making decision of creating Hoche village to develop the local tourism, children’s voices were also lost in creating and implementing the multicultural curriculum, which was in the name of supporting diversity and inclusion in ethnic minority education. Situated in the school that highlighted performances in Mandarin, English, and Mathematics, raised by families that give more attention to these “important” subjects, and positioned with an assimilated community eager to modernize by developing Hoche tourism without sustainable or indigenous goals, how could Hoche and Han children be expected to motivate themselves to engage with Hoche language and culture? Furthermore, how could those children be expected to thrive within a curriculum not ground in education beliefs for thriving childhoods or authentic expression of identity using one’s own voice, knowledges, and values?

Conclusion and implications

By examining children’s responses to the multicultural curriculum that emerged from governmental policy, the data indicated that despite the curriculum’s intention to balance unity and diversity, the inequalities persist as it focused on Han ways of knowing and being and excluded the children’s and community’s voices (O’Loughlin and Johnson, 2010). Taking the Hoche ethnic group as an example, they seek balance between modernization aspirations and ethnic cultural uniqueness. Notwithstanding expressed wishes for cultural preservation from Hoche people, authentic uses of this minority language are almost non-existent in public services, employment opportunities, and the media, and gradually, other minority languages are also losing their appeal for parents and local policymakers (Gao and Ren, 2019; Zhang and Pérez-Milans, 2019).

Although protecting the continuation of the Hoche culture is a major urgent issue, the multicultural Hoche curriculum had little chance of success because it was stripped of authentic purposes, and in fact the program was contradicted and ignored by children, teachers. The children at the Hoche Minzu school understood the implicit and explicit devaluations of Hoche culture and language even as they were depicted by the curriculum as “creative” and “rich.” While some of the Hoche children tried to embrace a positive Hoche identity, often being seen as Hoche meant being labeled as uncivilized or unintelligent by some Han children. None of the children expressed an interest in Hoche cultural tourism for their future. As claimed by Wang and Chen (2019), in the era of globalization, sustaining and maintaining the culture of ethnic minorities can by no means be fulfilled without considering the multilevel global lens and intercultural negotiations. To achieve an authentic multicultural curriculum, we must recognize traditional Hoche cultural characteristics and value the Hoche knowledge while situating the education of local children in a contemporary context while adopting a global stance.

The starting place for addressing those issues is not only within government institutions but also within the schools, educators, children, parents, and the self (Suaali’i-Sauni, 2007). Embracing children’s perspectives and community participation are the most important ways to revitalize the Hoche culture. Hoche children, as the future of this Indigenous group, should be recognized and provided with opportunities to tell their own stories in order to make meaningful changes in Hoche language education in response to community needs. As we listen to their perspectives, we can start to help Hoche children find their voices, to appreciate nuances and cultivate connections across Han and Hoche children, and to be open to the possibilities to empower Hoche children to learn, use, and spread native languages through more authentic, engaging learning opportunities (Barbian et al., 2017). The practical implications of the study suggest that ethnic-minority schools must be places where curriculum, instruction, and practices reflect the reclamation and revitalization of ethnic culture; multicultural education is situated in place and local context through an intersectional lens; and school policies must have an accountability system that is responsive to ethnic communities (Jones et al., 2018). In order to achieve these goals, educators should adopt culturally responsive pedagogy to use local and place-based resources (Simuda Huaman and Martin, 2020; Smith, 2012) to attend to their diverse community knowledge and values (Brayboy and Maaka, 2015; Jones et al., 2018). Thus, multicultural curriculum should serve as a portal to address diversity issues through inviting students and educators to make inclusive conversations to appreciate ethnic minorities’ voices, cultures, and perspectives (Hopkins, 2020) and to challenge, negotiate, and interrogate the impact of assimilation in ethnic minority communities. For outlooks on Hoche maintenance and revitalization, I encourage the use of insights from Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer (1998) to champion an optimistic vision that “involve[s] all of us in values clarification and to unite us in making informed choices and in taking timely and appropriate action. Hopefully, we all can learn through our mistakes and realign our courses while there is still time” (p. 57).

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Jue Wang

Notes

Author biography

Jue Wang is an assistant professor of Literacy Studies in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Idaho, the United States. She obtained her doctoral degree in Curriculum and Instruction from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Her research interests span both literacy practices and Indigenous education.

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