Pedagogical anchoring: world-making and spatial justice in China’s urban-rural borderlands

This study examines how teachers in China’s urban-rural borderlands create stability amid state-produced socio-spatial flux – a labour we conceptualise as pedagogical anchoring. Through critical narrative inquiry with twelve teachers, we identify anchoring as a cyclical praxis of Navigating prescribed curricula, Cultivating spaces of belonging, and Remaking professional identity. Findings reveal a paradox: this work enacts spatial justice for marginalised students while functioning as spatial-justice outsourcing, with teachers paying an agency-tax for systemic failures. We argue that anchoring constitutes vital yet exploited world-making and propose the right to anchor as a foundational ethic for spatially just teacher education and policy reform. The framework thus offers a portable lens for analysing teacher agency and its co-optation in contexts fractured by policy–reality disjunctures.