ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces an alternative schoolteacher recruitment program that delivers prestigious university graduates to teach in rural schools. Such a program originated from developed Western countries with distinguished program values. In developing countries such as China, research on this program is in its infancy. Exceptional Graduates as Rural Teachers (EGRT) is used in this chapter as a pseudonym for the Chinese program. The chapter explores the relationship of three main program participant experience, including 1) reasons for program participation, 2) disparities between pre-service assumptions and in-service perceptions towards local students, and 3) enactment of EGRT values in rural schools. Results from quantitative analysis show that the degree to which fellows enacted EGRT values when working in rural schools was influenced by self-benefit reasons, altruistic reasons, and disparities between fellows’ pre-service assumption and in-service perception regarding local students’ intelligence. Ironically, the outstanding academic achievement – one of the most important criteria of selecting fellows – became the obstacle to realizing the program’s values in reality. The classificatory scheme about intelligence easily attributed rural students’ academic failure to lacking innate abilities, which contributed to abandon EGRT values or make a compromise. We argue that reflexive knowledge workers are required in EGRT and similar alternative schoolteacher recruitment programs elsewhere.
