Abstract
Sara Delamont has been an important influence on my work in China’s higher education system – while teaching graduate courses in comparative education and academic communication, and when producing my own research. Having first encountered her writing as a doctoral student (Delamont, 2012b), I have found myself coming back for further insights, in the development of my own ‘academic habitus’ (Delamont et al., 1997).
My students – primarily Chinese, but including a growing number of international students from across Asia and Africa – often go on to become PhD candidates, academics, or schoolteachers. In our comparative education course, a major objective is to cast learners’ own educational backgrounds and contexts in a new light, so as to ‘fight familiarity’, since ‘the easiest way to develop a sense of analytical strangeness is to read the literature on education in other cultures’ (Delamont, 2005: 97). To pass through another of Delamont’s ‘four great gates’, we also recognise that ‘education does not equal schooling’ (2016). The course considers education through parenting, social media, and a range of other ‘non-school settings where teaching and learning take place’ (2012a: 59), inviting reflection on such features in learners’ own contexts, both past and future. And while students are sometimes accustomed to having theory handed down didactically, the course is grounded in the ‘spikenard, mastic and terebinth’ of the field (2001), exploring lesson observations, textbooks, and a range of other messy primary data, before moving on to more abstruse theoretical questions.
With my own research, the study by Delamont and colleagues (1997) in the UK context directly informed a recent ethnography of international PhD students and their supervisors in Chinese universities (Jeffrey and Hudson, in press). Observation in the field was favoured over interviews and questionnaires, as often ‘what people do seems so much more important than anything they can, or do, say’ (Delamont, 2012a: 57). I often instinctively lean toward more quantitative methods, and Delamont’s writings have been my gateway into understanding and incorporating a more hands-on, thickly descriptive approach, and one which is employed to improve ‘systematic analysis of social action’ rather than replace it (Atkinson and Delamont, 2006).
While Delamont’s research may have taken in Brazilian and French martial arts, Victorian schooling, and cross-Atlantic variations in methodology, published from the 1970s to today, the same themes carry an on-going relevance here, in the newly influential educational context of China. A place where criticism of policymaking is not a ‘popular indoor sport’ (Delamont, 1999) to the same extent, and where educational research is more handmaiden than it is ‘hooligan’ (2000), it is nonetheless valuable to use these and other of Delamont’s ideas when cultivating new ‘craft knowledge’ for our context (Delamont and Atkinson, 2001).