In The Tibetan Substitute Teachers Living Conditions Survey Analysis

As a special and complicated disadvantaged group, substitute teachers attract more and more social attentions. In the countryside, the large majority of substitute teachers work in the remote village schools and teaching fields. They work in the very tough environments and undertake the formidable tasks. It is obvious that there are more substitute teachers in the poorer villages. In some far and remote village schools, they are indispensable and irreplaceable in the local compulsory education system. However, because of their special working identities and the arbitrariness of the personnel procedure, there are often the large imbalance between their contribution and the payment. From the day they stand on the platform, they never share the "Minimum Wage Guarantee System" and other necessary social welfare assurances, which are written in the "Law of Labor". They live on a slim income. Their payments are hugely under the criteria of "the living expenses of a laborer and his or her average dependants", let alone the "national average salary". Therefore, substitute teachers are beyond the protection of law and one of the marginalized groups. At present, the most part of the studies take the substitute teachers as a part of the problems of educations in the countryside, but as a marginalized group, the academics focus more on the farmer workers or the other groups. There are very less studies about the substitute teachers as a marginalized group. This essay takes the substitute teachers in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture as the object for the case study, describes their current marginalized living situations, analyzes their social status as a marginalized group and holds that both the institutional factors and their own limitations result in the present circumstances. Based on such an analysis, the essay will propose some suggestions and solutions to improve their present marginalized situation.According to the relative theory of sociology, the research has taken both qualitative research and quantitative research method of combining the same time, using documents, questionnaires and in-depth interviews. Taking Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, for example, through the focused interviews of substitute teachers, we investigated the living conditions of their families, mental health, working conditions, social security status in depth, trying to reveal the existence of substitute teachers in groups of problems.Structural framework of this paper is as follows:Part One:Introduction, including the background, the significance, relative researches, concept definitions, the object of study, research methods and the process.Part Two:Historical development of substitute teachers and the educational situation in Gannan Prefecture. It describes the formation of substitute teachers, development and evolution of the basic situation in Gannan Prefecture and its education profile.Part Three:Perspective on the living conditions of substitute teachers. Through the questionnaire and in-depth interviews, it describes the basic conditions and characteristics of substitute teacher groups, analyzes and reveals the living conditions of marginalized substitute teachers, and their status and characteristics are also summarized.Part Four:The analysis and countermeasures for the formation of substitute teachers under the living conditions of marginalization. Substitute teachers problems resulted from both the system factors and personal ones. Besides increasing investment in education, it is necessary to effectively solve substitute teachers'problems basing on the local actual conditions, to improve the living of marginalized status of substitute teachers.