02 December 2025, Volume 34 Issue 2

    

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  Shaping Ideal Students: Ethnographic Insights from a Public Middle School

  Zhu Yunshu

  China's Education: Research & Review. 2025, 34(2): 1-58.

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  This study conceptualizes student learning as a cultural process rather than merely a cognitive process, aiming to explore how school educational culture shapes students’ learning and development. Drawing on the theory of “figured worlds” and based on ethnographic fieldwork in a public middle school in Shanghai, the research investigates
  how a specific schooling context guides students’ learning and development through various discourses, practices, and interactions, thereby constructing images of ideal students. The findings reveal that the school constructs an educational cultural world that encourages individualized student growth and promotes a proactive attitude toward learning by emphasizing students’ unique strengths and potential and supporting the discovery and development of diverse talents through discourse, practice, and emotionally supportive pedagogical interactions. This study highlights the realistic possibility for schools at the basic education level to partially transcend the dominant logic centered on academic achievement, offering valuable empirical insight into the relationships between students’ self-construction
  of subjects, learning and development, and school educational culture.
  
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  A Study on Character Origin-based Literacy Teaching for Hearing-impaired Students in Junior High Schools for the Deaf

  Zhang Jian Yu Mengyue

  China's Education: Research & Review. 2025, 34(2): 59-124.

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  Amid the national drive to popularize the standard spoken and written language and promote the high-quality development of special education, the teaching of Chinese character recognition for hearingimpaired students urgently requires optimization. This paper examines the challenges faced by deaf junior high school students in learning to read and write Chinese characters. Field research conducted at five schools for the deaf revealed common issues in teaching practices, including insufficient emphasis on literacy, limited instructional methods, and objectives misaligned with curriculum standards. These shortcomings have led to a significantly limited vocabulary among students. To address these challenges, the study introduces a “character origin-based literacy” teaching method. This approach is grounded in the principles of Chinese character formation, leverages the visual-spatial strengths of hearingimpaired students, draws on the similarities between sign language and Chinese characters, and incorporates the cultural significance of the script. A tailored teaching plan was developed for this learner group. Employing a mixed-methods approach, an experimental study was conducted with hearing-impaired students of a special education school in F County, Chongqing. Results showed that students in the character origin-based literacy group outperformed the control group in literacy test scores, retention of learned content, and construction of word meanings—demonstrating both immediate and long-term benefits. The findings suggest that character origin-based literacy enhances students’ ability to form connections between word form and meaning, increases morpheme awareness, and ultimately improves literacy efficiency. Based on these results, the study proposes the development of dynamic character origin teaching tools, integration of sign language instruction, creation of rich cultural learning contexts, and the establishment of a tiered review mechanism. These strategies aim to provide more effective literacy pathways for hearing-impaired students and offer practical guidance for classroom teachers.
  
  
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  “The Growth Code of Digital Natives”: A Study on Media Practices and Learning Methods of Contemporary College Students

  Duan Junji

  China's Education: Research & Review. 2025, 34(2): 125-179.

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  This study takes the media practice of contemporary college students as its theme, and based on the background of educational reform in the media era, explores how media practice influences the learning methods of contemporary college students. Centering on the core issues, this study selected 35 “Generation Z” college students as research
  objects. Through an 8-month in-depth interview, data collection was carried out. The data were encoded and interpreted through thematic analysis. Taking the relationship flow between knowledge and practice as the thread,
  this study explores how contemporary college students can achieve media iteration of their learning methods in both on-campus time and space and off-campus fields through media practice, and takes this as an entry point to reveal the interactive picture contained in the educational experience. This study attempts to reveal the occurrence process and operational mechanism of college students’ media actions, with the aim of providing theoretical references and practical guidance for understanding the individual growth, educational choices, and cultural representations of contemporary college students. While highlighting the culture of contemporary college students, it also opens up new research paths for higher education management.
  
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  “Grow up Like This ”: An Inquiry of the Life and Education of Teenage Online Gamers

  Lin Chenglan

  China's Education: Research & Review. 2025, 34(2): 180-236.

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  The lifeworld of contemporary teenager is undergoing profound transformation, as digital media—exemplified by online games—reshape their developmental trajectories and educational needs. This study adopts a netnographic approach, focusing on the living experiences and subjective perspectives of teenage online gamers. Through long-term observation and in-depth tracking of the gaming practices of ten participants aged 16 to 24, we closely examined their engagement with mainstream games such as Honor of Kings and Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice, as well
  as their broader online activities, including game livestreaming, video production, and fan content creation. The findings reveal that for teenager, “playing” is not merely a way of entertainment, but a constructive activity imbued with cultural autonomy. It shapes their real-world social networks, serves as a medium for self-understanding and understanding the world, and facilitates connections with others. While “playing” initially manifests as a variety of digital practices driven primarily by entertainment motives, it gradually evolves into a vital pathway for teenager to learn social rules, engage in cultural production, and participate in the public sphere. Through this process of playing, they are transformed from entertainment consumers into lifelong learners embedded within the digital society. As these “game youths” move between online and offline worlds, they actively or passively seek balance between the centralized, regulated space of school and the decentralized, nomadic space of digital media. They continually adjust their self-strategies between mainstream and marginal positions, strong and weak social ties, and strive to maintain a delicate balance among multiple norms and value systems. The nomadism of playing stands in sharp contrast to the stability of school, highlighting schools’ continuing value as social anchors. The two spheres may appear to be mutually opposite, they in fact interact and jointly constitute a core tension in the developmental landscape of the new generation of teenager.