Rural teachers are a weak part of China’s teacher team. Over ten years, China has been continuously making up deficiencies in its policy, with the focus first on rural teachers, teachers of village schools and teaching sites, then further on the rural teachers in the contiguous poverty-stricken areas, national-level poor counties, and finally on teachers of areas of extreme poverty like the “three regions” and “three prefectures.” The construction of the rural teacher policy system has been continuously strengthened by refining supplement, enhancing security, optimizing management, and improving quality, which has effectively helped with the problem of “teachers are unwilling to teach, to stay, or to teach well in rural areas,” and laid a solid foundation for improving the quality of rural teachers and narrowing the gap between urban and rural education. However, there are still deficiencies in the policies concerning rural teachers. Further investigation and monitoring are needed to consolidate the foundation for policy improvement research and reflect the rural point of view in policy making.
In the past decade, the Special-Contracted Teacher Scheme has witnessed remarkable progress, but there are deficiencies including inadequate benefit guarantee for and mixed reviews on the quality of special-contracted teachers. In the context of developing the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025) for education and accelerating the modernization of education, the current implementation of the Special Contracted Teacher Scheme requires to be further examined and judged, to adjust the policy in time and present policy recommendations for the supply of rural teachers during the 14th Five-Year Plan period. Therefore, several scholars were invited to contribute to gain insight into this policy from multiple perspectives.
The Special-Contracted Teacher Scheme, a supplement to the traditional mode of teacher supply, has been implemented for 17 years and the teaching quality of those teachers has gained a lot of attention. Using data of teachers and students from the sample counties in four central and western provincial-level administrative units, this paper studies how special-contracted teachers have affected students’ academic performance and non-cognitive ability according to the student development framework of the new human capital theory, and how those effects vary among different teacher groups. Results show that while special-contracted teachers have helped improve the academic performance of rural students, their role is limited in improving students’ non-cognitive ability. At the same time, female special-contracted teachers and those without a normal major play an obviously bigger role in raising students’ academic performance. The conclusion is that special-contracted teachers can to some extent help narrow the urban-rural gap in academic performance, but more research needs to be done to better understand their effects on students’ non-cognitive ability.
The reform of rural teacher team building has entered the deep-water zone where tough challenges must be met in the new era. In order to adapt to the new situation and cope with the new challenges, the national training of K-12 teachers in China should set up the concept of high-quality products, summarize the experience of the grass-roots level, aim at the prominent problems, give full play to the exemplary and leading role of the National Training Plan, and promote the comprehensive improvement of the quality and efficiency of teacher training. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, the national training of K-12 teachers in China has achieved gratifying results, as well as considerable problems in the implementation of the National Training Plan. On the basis of sorting out the progress of the national training for K-12 teachers in the new era, this paper puts forward development strategies.
The educational practice of pre-service teachers is an essential part of teacher training. As an important form of educational practice, volunteer teaching can effectively improve the quality of teacher training and bridge the serving of basic education. Upon the literature review on existing volunteer teaching models, this paper develops a teaching community of teachers under “Internet Plus” and the prototype of a “relay” volunteer teaching model towards the integrated design of training undergraduate pre-teachers and improving the educational quality of small rural schools. The sound “relay” volunteer teaching model has been formed upon revisions around checking its completeness, optimizing its operability, and enhancing its stability using the design-based research paradigm according to the research path of “planning-application-reflection-improvement.” The practice has indicated positive effects of the new model in promoting the academic development of students in small rural schools, enhancing the classroom teaching competency of rural teachers, and improving the professionalism of pre-service teachers. The quality and efficiency of the new model can be improved through initiatives such as providing timely and efficient technical support, establishing a favorable and harmonious relationship between teachers and students, adopting guidance with double-qualified instructors for instant companionship, and implementing flexible incentives and restraints.
Based on the identity theory and the sociological institutionalism theory, this study establishes a triple identity analysis framework and describes the interaction pattern and internal logic between the internal identity cognition and the external identity expectation of rural-oriented pre-service teachers through the study of educational ethnography. It is found that while they form a dominant identity in the interaction with policies, they are also endowed with the identity “privilege” and the energized learning motivation, but there are mutual restrictions between policies’ entitlement and empowerment. In the interaction with social norms, they exchange with the policies reciprocally due to the torture of moral obligation, and then consciously undertake the responsibilities of their identity, but ego and publicity still conflict with each other in the underlying logic. In the interaction with their ego, they gradually reconcile with themselves and reshape their identity after experiencing identity rejection under the stigmatization cognition. Then, in the process of habitualization and institutionalization of identity, they adopt two different strategies: passive compromise and active adjustment.